AidenShaw said:
True, but the question is what *name* will Intel choose to market Woodcrest as?
The evidence is strong that they'll stick with the strong Xeon brand for workstations and servers - and "Core" for laptops and desktops.
Woodcrest is a sibling of Merom/Conroe, therefore descended from Yonah, Dothan and Banias.
No Xeon blood here, except for the Netburst parts of the Core 2 architecture which are also in Merom and Conroe.
It's already pretty well known that Woodcrest will be sold as both 'Xeon' and 'Core 2 Extreme'. The 'Core 2 Extreme' part will likely have dual-socket disabled, but will otherwise be a Xeon clone. (Just as the 'Pentium 4 Extreme Edition' and dual-core 'Pentium Extreme Edition' are Netburst-core Xeons with multiple sockets disabled.)
Woodcrest, Conroe, and Merom are all a hybrid of Yonah/Dothan/Banias and parts of NetBurst.
And 'Xeon' has always been an upgraded version of the mainline desktop part. The original Xeons actually had the name of their desktop equivalent in the name 'Pentium II Xeon' and 'Pentium III Xeon'. Only with the intro of the NetBurst Pentium 4 did Intel drop the 'Pentium
x' part of the name to call it just plain Xeon. So when they have a major upgrade of the core, Xeon gets that core, too. So far, there have been three major cores to the Xeon line, Core 2 Xeon will be the fifth. Note that 'Core 2' won't be part of the name, I just put it there for clarification. In the three major cores, there have been 14 revisions (P2/Deschutes, P3/Katmai, P3/Cascades, P3/Cascades MP, P4/Foster, P4/Prestonia, P4/Gallatin, P4/Prescott, P4/Nocona, P4/Irwindale, P4/Cranford, P4/Potomac, P4/Paxville, Core/Sossaman; note that I don't count Multiprocessor separately unless there is more different than just multiprocessing.) Dempsey and Tulsa are scheduled to be the last two P4 based Xeons, but the the early arrival of Core-2-based Woodcrest, I have a feeling Dempsey and Tulsa will be cancelled.
Multimedia said:
I guess for marketing purposes you may be right and it may retain the old family name of Xeon even though it is really high end Core 2 Duo.
Again, Xeon has
always been a 'really high end' version of the current desktop chip. It has already had three major architecture changes under the Xeon name.
Stuartluff said:
Now you need to know how many cores it has, whether core 2 duo is really 2 cores or 4 and whether woodcrap or ****flap are actually faster than moron.
Well, 'Core 2 Duo' is just the second generation 'Core' architecture chip (Core 2) with two cores (Duo). If they consider a quad-core version to still be part of the 'Core 2' generation, then it will likely be the 'Core 2 Quad' or similar. A third-generation Core architecture chip with four cores would be 'Core 3 Quad'. So 'Core
x' denotes the generation, then Solo, Duo, or Quad denotes the number of cores. (It might make sense for a quad-core to be called 'Quadro', too, but nVidia has that as the name of their high-end professional graphics chip, 'Quadra' might make sense, too, but that one is Apple's old name for high end 68040 machines.)
