Woodcrest is the code-name of Intel’s next generation Xeon CPUs which utilizes the new Core architecture. Intel has long planned to release Woodcrest before both Conroe and Merom, the latter being for the desktop and mobile market. The CPU was first to be released on the 19th of June, but now according to the Register Intel is going to release it a week later. Woodcrest, being a very important CPU for Intel due to the success AMD has had with their Opteron CPUs. Dell, who has never used AMD’s CPUs before, now tells us that they’re going to ship Opteron-based servers, which does indicate that Intel is losing on the serverside as well as the desktopside.
Intel also tells us that their NetBurst-based serverchip codenamed “Tulsa” is going to be released earlier than planned. From the last quarter of ’06 to the third quarter this year. Tulsa, which is based on the NetBurst technology, not the Core technology as Woodcrest is, sports an impressive 16MB of cache which dubbles the performance compared to models of today. The CPU is also specified to be used in multi-CPU systems, often featuring four CPU sockets.
