MAY 24--Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, CA; www.intel.com) and Motorola Inc. (Schaumburg, IL; www.motorola.com) have released the 1.7-GHz Xeon processor and the PowerPC MPC7440 700-MHz processor, respectively.
The Intel Xeon processor is claimed to deliver a 30% to 90% performance boost over Pentium III-based Xeon processors. It uses Intel's NetBurst microarchitecture, which targets video, audio, and 3-D graphics applications. Based on Intel's 860 chipset, the processor comes with dual bands of Rambus RDRAM memory. Price is $406 in 1000-unit quantities.
Aimed at embedded and computer systems, the Motorola MPC7440 provides a core voltage of 1.5 V and consumes 11.4 W at 600 MHz. It offers a 256K L2 cache and a seven-stage pipeline. The integrated MPX system bus can achieve a sustained bandwidth of 1.064 Gbytes/s, delivering up to four times the bus performance over the company's G3-type processors. Price is $159 in 10,000 quantities.
