Intel Corp. is shipping a new Xeon chip line aimed at high-end four- and eight-way servers. It is based on a 900-MHz Pentium III processor core and features 2-MBytes of "on-die" Level 2 Advanced Transfer Cache memory, a 100-MHz system bus and Advanced System Buffering to increase throughput and reduce latencies. The company claims it is 20 percent faster than the existing 700-MHz Pentium III chip,

The chip will be the last based on the 0.18 micron PIII core before the Xeon lines for high-end servers switches to the Pentium 4 core. In 1,000-unit quantities, they sell for $3,692.

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