Content area
Full Text
ON THE SURFACE, NOCONA1S IMPROVEMENTS APPEAR TYPICAL OF INTEL'S dual-processor Xeon evolutionary tradition: a higher clock speed and a faster front-side bus. But this time, in a departure from its usual formula, Intel has added several noteworthy twists intended to stem customer and OEM defections from Xeon to AMD's fast-tracked Opteron.
As a 32-bit x86 processor, Nocona is a killer that instantly obsoletes its predecessor, Xeon DP. Nocona is manufactured using a 90-nanometer process rather than Xeon DP's 130-nanometer process, allowing Intel to pack more transistors into a smaller space and to drive the chip at a lower voltage. This helps to offset the heat and power draw associated with higher clock speeds. Intel also exploited the extra real estate by raising Level 2 cache size to 1MB from Xeon DP's 512KB. Bumping up the size of the Level 2 cache allowed Intel to remove the Level 3 cache it had incorporated in late-model Xeon DP processors. It is...