Putting the Pentium D To Work

Intel Corp. says that small-business, single-processor servers can now feel a little less inferior to their two- and four-way big brothers: The chip giant's new E7230 chipset adds dual-core capability to entry-level servers, supporting the new Pentium D as well as the single-core Pentium 4 CPU.

Thriftily priced at $36 apiece in 1,000-unit OEM quantities, the E7230 is compatible with Intel's Hyper-Threading and Extended Memory 64 Technologies as well as Enhanced SpeedStep and Serial ATA with Matrix Storage Technology. It works with 800MHz- and 1066MHz-bus LGA775 processors and dual-channel DDR-2/400, /533, and /667 memory with ECC support. The chipset also provides an integrated Serial ATA controller, PCI Express x8 port, and configurable 1x4/2x1 PCI Express ports for high-bandwidth server I/O.

At the opposite end of the server spectrum, Intel has introduced two Itanium 2 processors with a 667MHz front-side bus, giving 10.6Gbps of system bandwidth compared to the old 400MHz bus's 6.4Gbps. Aimed at enterprise mainframe migration, RISC replacement, and high-performance computing, the 1.66GHz CPUs have 6MB and 9MB of cache, with 1,000-unit OEM prices of $2,194 and $4,655 respectively. Intel's current server platforms and chipsets don't support the faster bus, but the company says Hitachi has designed a compatible chipset for BladeSymphony servers coming in August.