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Intel to Revive PIII?

By Nils Dahl

Date: October 25, 2001

Gee, about 3 weeks ago I asked Darek Mihocka of Emulators Inc. about reconsidering and retesting. He said 'no point to it'. And now he goes ahead and reveals Intel's secret plans for reviving the PIII. Well, he didn't say just that but his testing of Tualatin shows the vast performance improvement. His analysis made for an entertaining and educational read.

So I might as well leak this bit of inside info. Yes, Intel is going to revive the PIII in several forms just to hold onto its existing server/workstation business. Otherwise AMD could move right in.

I can also assure you that a dual Itanium system exists in this form; basic smp dual processor that can take 8-64 gigabytes of main memory custom ultra2 scsi raid systems with up to 256 megabytes of caching memory on controller gigabit ethernet ports dual 600 watt power supplies.

Thanks to the 64-bit data bus, this design really does work very well as a server. No, I didn't hear how much external cache is used with each 'blade' but that too is very high. And the system runs several of the latest UNIX os systems, has been tested with certain business applications - and works great. It is a very good price/performance box for certain types of server work, basically $30k for the case and mb without drives. Maybe a bit under $100k fully configured.

You don't need super fast fpus in many servers. If you cram in enough main memory and add a large enough cache, even the PIII in a Xeon card could perform very nicely. As usual, the overall architecture is a more important factor than raw processor horsepower.

nils dahl

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