Intel: Caneland turning AMD's server momentum around

Chicago (IL) – Intel is gearing up to launch the its Xeon 7300 processor, the last piece of its Core micro-architecture strategy. It’s a critical product that is designed to attack AMD in a market that is still dominated by the green team. But Intel believes that is going to change.

An internal newsletter article, Intel is preparing its employees for the launch of the Caneland platform and the Xeon 7300 processor, previously code-named "Tigerton". The company chooses aggressive phrases to stress its confidence that the MP processor will successfully "tackle" what is AMD’s only remaining bastion today.

Intel acknowledged that AMD "has gained market share versus Intel for several quarters based on MP platforms and its Hypertransport architecture," which enabled the company to convince many big OEMs to switch to the Opteron processor. However, Intel said that the Xeon 7300 platform is "key to helping turn this AMD momentum around". "We’re excited to hear some of AMD’s largest OEMs now calling the Caneland platform their ’virtualization platform of choice’," the article states.

Intel said that more than 40 OEMs will make Xeon 7300 announcements later this quarter, including "a variety of servers, including traditional rack-mount server designs, [the firm’s] first multi-national OEM 4-socket blade designs, new high-density 1u and 2u designs. IBM apparently is planning a new platform based on its own Hurricane 4 chipset design, which will only be available in combination with a Xeon 7300 CPU.

Intel claims that Caneland will offer 2x the performance and 3x the performance/watt of the current-generation Intel Xeon processor 7100 series platform.

AMD, of course, will not be standing still. The company is expected to launch its first quad-core Opteron processor, code-named "Barcelona" on September 10.