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New `Tulsa` Xeon by Intel

Servers using the chipmaker`s forthcoming high-end "Tulsa" Xeon were showed this week by Intel and Dell. The new chips that were used in the servers are on display at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Linux is popular mainly on servers, so Intel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Advanced Micro Devices and others with server products are prime sponsors of the show.

A dual-core processor Tulsa is the last of the ill-fated NetBurst lineage of x86 chips from Intel. The NetBurst design in recent years was more notable for increases in power consumption than in performance, but it`s now been largely replaced by the Core microarchitecture that is more economical and has better performances.

Intel released in June a Core-based Xeon called Woodcrest, but it is used only in dual-processor servers. Tulsa is for more powerful four-processor machines. Each Tulsa processor core has 1MB of level-two cache memory, and the two cores share a whopping 16MB of level-three cache memory, more than any other x86 processor. Cache memory stores instructions and data so the information can be retrieved more quickly than that in main memory.