Intel moves up delivery date for 'Paxville' processors

Intel Corp. is planning to release its dual-core, hyperthreaded Xeon and Xeon MP processors, known under the "Paxville" code name, later this year in advance of the original delivery date of 2006, the company announced Monday. The chip giant said the move was possible due to the development of the Paxville processors being ahead of schedule.

"As they did with dual-core PC processors earlier this year, Intel engineers have executed exquisitely, and because of that we'll bring our dual-core Intel Xeon processor platforms to the marketplace well ahead of schedule," Kirk Skaugen, general manager of Intel's server platforms group, said in an Intel release.

Dual-core computing is the placing together of two CPUs (central processing units) on a single piece of silicon as a way to both cut costs and lower thermal emissions. Since processor-intensive tasks can be handled separately, dual-core chips can also help improve the performance of multithreaded applications.

The dual-core Xeon processor MP, code-named "Paxville," is for use in servers with four or more processors. Paxville will use Intel's E8500 chipset, which the company introduced earlier this year, according to the release.

Code-named "Paxville DP," the dual-core Xeon chip, is for use in dual-processor servers, and will be based on the company's E7520, Intel said in the release. The processor is for early adopters of dual-core technology and will be followed by a family of dual-core Xeon processor-based platforms, code-named "Bensley" for servers and "Glidewell" for servers, in the first quarter of 2006.

The 64-bit Paxville and Paxville DP chips will use Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology, which enables a single dual-core processor to run four threads at the same time, Intel said.

With Intel currently developing 17 multi-core projects, the chip giant is expecting over 85 percent of its server chips to be multi-core by the end of 2006, the company said in the release.

Intel is on track to ship its dual-core Itanium chips by the close of this year, according to the release.