Intel: Cranford and Potomac scheduled for H1 2005, multi-cores appear on roadmap

San Francisco (CA) - Abhi Talwalkar, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Enterprise Platforms Group, detailed the firm’s Xeon and Itanium processor roadmap in his keynote at IDF. The executive introduced a range of new code-named processors on Intel’s roadmap, including multi-core Xeons and Itaniums.

The first two Intel Xeon MP processors based on the 90 nm process, codenamed "Cranford" and "Potomac," are expected in the first half of 2005. The products will include Intel’s Extended Memory 64 technology and demand based switching with SpeedStep technology. They will be supported by a new four-way chipset, codenamed Twin Castle that supports PCI Express and DDR2 memory. Cranford is Intel’s future Xeon DP, Potomac will support four and eight processors.

Farther out on the roadmap are a multi-core Intel Xeon processor MP, codenamed "Whitefield," and its multi-core Itanium 2 processor counterpart, codenamed "Tukwila." Whitefield will share common platform architecture with Tukwila.

For two-way servers and workstations, Intel disclosed "Irwindale," the codename for a follow-on processor to the recently introduced Intel Xeon processor at 3.6 GHz. Irwindale is expected to give customers a performance boost when compared to previous Intel Xeon processors because of a faster clock speed and larger two megaByte cache.