The Gallatin servers to some degree will also compete against servers running Intel's more expensive Itanium chip. Benchmark tests show that the difference between the Gallatin servers and current Itanium servers isn't huge. On the Transaction Performance Council's TPC-C benchmark, which counts transactions per second, the four-processor Gallatin box is currently only "a little bit underneath" a similar Itanium system, Intel's Graff said. "That's a real problem for Intel," Hewitt said. "Until the applications are there (for Itanium) and until the operating systems are there with all of the capabilities, you can probably do most of the things you want to do with the Xeon products." Graff said that the close performance between the current Gallatin systems and Itanium comes from the oscillating nature of the product releases. The last Itanium, Itanium 2, came out this summer. Madison, a new version of Itanium coming next year, will open the gap. "You will see the Itanium line consistently ahead of Xeon," Graff said. The Gallatin systems also handily beat published benchmarks from Sun. Opteron, AMD's server chip, could put pressure on Intel. "That has some significant benefits," IBM's Outhout said. "We think they have the opportunity to do some serious damage to Intel next year." IBM will use the new chip in the four-processor x255 server, which can be equipped with its own storage unit, the x360 for racks, and the x440. An eight-way x440 achieved a TPC-C benchmark of 111,024 transactions per second, which IBM asserts is a new record. The chip will displace the older chip over the next eight to 10 weeks, according to IBM. Dell, meanwhile, will start offering Gallatin in the PowerEdge 6600 and 6650 servers, a representative said. The line starts at $5,999. HP will offer the chip on the ProLiant ML570 and ProLiant DL760 servers. A fully configured ProLiant achieved a TPC-C score of 111,805, according to HP. Both IBM and HP will insert the chip into blade servers in 2003. Blades are far thinner than standard servers and can be managed more easily from a central location. The new chips run at 1.5GHz, 1.9GHz and 2GHz. The 1.5GHz and 1.9GHz models contain only 1MB of cache, while the 2GHz version contains 2MB. The chips are made on the 130-nanometre manufacturing process, while the older Xeons were made on the 180-nanometre process. The nanometer figure refers to the average size of features on the chip. Shrinking the chip allowed Intel to insert more cache, Graff said. The 1.5GHz version sells for $1,177 in 1,000-unit quantities, while the 1.9GHz and 2GHz versions sell, respectively, for $1,980 and $3,692.
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