Intel's Lindenhurst, the two-way chipset for servers supporting 64-bit processors from Intel is going to be launched on Monday, August 2 despite that this chipset has some small problems with PCI Express.
In test situations PCI Express on Lindenhurst doesn't work right. But in real-life situations this should not give a problem.
Intel has been informing OEMs of the problem, which of course has tongues wagging, and as a result Intel's only going to have a limited number of PCI-Express SKUs for the time being.
Evidently there's no problem with single-channel PCI-Express and some OEMs will reportedly still go ahead and ship full-blown PCI-Express anyway, but chip groupie Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 says the problem will "constrain the appeal" of Lindenhurst-based servers. Even simply qualifying them will slow, he says, because people want to check out PCI-Express.
Lindenhurst was designed for Nocona, which, of course, is the server or Xeon DP version of the 90nm Prescott chip and like Prescott is fitted out with 64-bit extensions just like AMD's Opteron. Nocona itself launched at the end of June along with Tumwater, the Intel chipset made for high-end Nocona workstations.
Intel is reportedly expecting to have the kinks ironed out of PCI-Express by the end of the quarter and to be shipping it in all its glory by then. Nathan thinks Q4 is more likely.
Intel has tried to impress upon the world that Nocona's derivative 64-bitness isn't its only sexy feature and that with Lindenhurst the thing also gets DDR 2 memory, a faster 800MHz front-side bus, and new RAID storage capabilities along with enhanced power management, 1MB of L3 cache and SSE3 instructions. Boxes made with the stuff can support 16GB of main memory.
On the other hand, Microsoft's 64-bit operating system for both Intel's and AMD's 64-bit processor is still not ready. The release of this OS has even been delayed to next year.
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