Intel Hones Ship Dates For Dual-Core Server, Quad-Core Chips

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Intel is moving up its ship date for Woodcrest, the first dual-core server processor based on its new Core Architecture, a top Intel executive said Tuesday.

Woodcrest will now ship in the third quarter, Tom Kilroy, vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said at the Intel Solutions Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz. Intel originally expected to ship the processor in the "late third-quarter or fourth-quarter time frame," he said.

Kilroy also told system builders that the company's quad-core processor, code-named Clovertown, will ship in the first quarter of 2007. Intel had previously pegged that product to ship early next year, though many industry observers said they expected it sometime in the first quarter.

"This is an indication of how serious we are about gaining leadership," Kilroy said. "If you look at where we have lost ground, it has been in the server marketplace."

Intel has been dogged by rival Advanced Micro Devices in the server space, where AMD's processors have earned widespread kudos for better performance and less power consumption than competing Intel chips. AMD more than doubled its server market share in 2005, according to data from Mercury Research. Intel's first dual-core server processors, launched late last year, weren’t well-accepted by the system builder community because of power requirements and performance issues.

To alleviate performance concerns, Intel initially had planned a first-quarter dual-core refresh, code-named Dempsey. Servers based on Dempsey were originally scheduled to show up around March, but the technology wasn't ready, forcing Intel to push the release to May, Intel representatives confirmed. Intel said it will ship Dempsey CPUs to OEMs by the end of this month.

Intel's real comeback centers around the new Core Architecture, which the company said will bolster performance by packing two CPUs running at lower clock speeds onto one die and increasing the number of tasks that can be run in parallel. Kilroy said Intel must get that processor, code-named Woodcrest, on the market as soon as possible to better compete.

The new schedule, however, narrows the gap of the release date between the two processors by just months. Kilroy said Intel has limited the number of Dempsey SKUs to compensate for the changes. In addition, Intel disclosed Monday that it will offer a low-cost, channel-specific Dempsey SKU for system builders in the volume server market.

Though some system builders said the close ship dates of the two server processors is unusual, they didn’t express any immediate concerns.

"I would expect it will be more of a problem for Intel than for us," said Glen Cottfield, president of Cheap Guys Computer, Orlando, Fla. Cheap Guys has started building $12,000 to $16,000 servers for a variety of business customers, he said.

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