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Conclusion
According to our tests, the development of Foster has been a step in the right direction for Xeon-class processors. Intel has obviously learned from the mistakes that have been made at the time of the Pentium III, and the new generation of Xeons has its own place on the market. By taking the dual-processing ability out of the desktop chips, high-end workstation users will always have to get a Xeon, which will cause bigger sales than ever for the Xeon processors. While the Foster will of course be more expensive than the Pentium 4, the extra money is partly justified by Jackson Technology and the faster i860 chipset. This justification is hard to find when looking at the current generation of Xeon processors (at least the ‘light’ ones). The improvements that the Xeon has made over the Pentium 4 are very obvious, but we’re pretty sure that these will play a more important role in the future, especially when commonly used server software is optimised for these new technologies.
What the exact price of the new Xeon will be isn’t clear yet, but with the price of the Pentium 4 falling rapidly at this moment, it is quite possible that the Foster DP will be released at the same price as the one at which the Pentium 4 is currently selling. With big names like SuperMicro and Tyan behind the mainboards it won’t be difficult to build attractive CAD/CAM workstations based on two Fosters. This brings us to another point, because there is another company that has a solution for dual-processor workstations in the making.
The AMD 760MP chipset will be released at the same time as the Palomino processor, probably before Foster and the i860. We can expect that a system with two Palomino processors is somewhat cheaper than a dual Foster setup. Moreover, Palomino will have some improvements to the core and will probably be performing a bit better than the current Athlon. However, the choice of mainboards and chipsets will be bigger on the Intel side, and big companies that don’t trust a newcomer like AMD will certainly not work to the advantage of the Palomino, too. Furthermore, AMD is far from the scalability of Intel. Designing dual Socket A mainboards is already a complex task because of the point-to-point bus, let alone designing them with two or four times as many processors. We still don’t know what exactly the AMD 760MPX chipset is, but we do know that Intel isn’t waiting for AMD to make the next move at this point. Also, there are no official plans of AMD to release Athlons with a larger cache.
The future of Foster depends, among others, on the 870 chipset from Intel. With this chipset, systems consisting of up to 512 processors can be built, in subclusters of four. This chipset will support both RDRAM and DDR SDRAM. At the same time that the Pentium 4 will receive its Northwood core, Foster will get a new 0,13 micron revision too. This core, codenamed ‘Prestonia’, will be released together with the Plumas DDR chipset.
Of course our thanks go out to our anonymous source, who let us use this system while endangering his own life
. Thanks a lot and keep up the good work 
.
What the exact price of the new Xeon will be isn’t clear yet, but with the price of the Pentium 4 falling rapidly at this moment, it is quite possible that the Foster DP will be released at the same price as the one at which the Pentium 4 is currently selling. With big names like SuperMicro and Tyan behind the mainboards it won’t be difficult to build attractive CAD/CAM workstations based on two Fosters. This brings us to another point, because there is another company that has a solution for dual-processor workstations in the making.
The AMD 760MP chipset will be released at the same time as the Palomino processor, probably before Foster and the i860. We can expect that a system with two Palomino processors is somewhat cheaper than a dual Foster setup. Moreover, Palomino will have some improvements to the core and will probably be performing a bit better than the current Athlon. However, the choice of mainboards and chipsets will be bigger on the Intel side, and big companies that don’t trust a newcomer like AMD will certainly not work to the advantage of the Palomino, too. Furthermore, AMD is far from the scalability of Intel. Designing dual Socket A mainboards is already a complex task because of the point-to-point bus, let alone designing them with two or four times as many processors. We still don’t know what exactly the AMD 760MPX chipset is, but we do know that Intel isn’t waiting for AMD to make the next move at this point. Also, there are no official plans of AMD to release Athlons with a larger cache.
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The future of Foster depends, among others, on the 870 chipset from Intel. With this chipset, systems consisting of up to 512 processors can be built, in subclusters of four. This chipset will support both RDRAM and DDR SDRAM. At the same time that the Pentium 4 will receive its Northwood core, Foster will get a new 0,13 micron revision too. This core, codenamed ‘Prestonia’, will be released together with the Plumas DDR chipset.
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Of course our thanks go out to our anonymous source, who let us use this system while endangering his own life
. Thanks a lot and keep up the good work .
Door 
