Intel accelerates shipment date of its Opteron beater "Tulsa"

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that Intel has moved up the shipment of its Tulsa processor, which will succeed the current Xeon MP 7000 series with Paxville core. Instead of making the processor available in the fourth quarter of this year, Intel spokesperson Bill Calder said that the processor will ship already in Q3. It was unclear whether he was referring to actual product availability to end-users or to processor shipments to system builders.

Asked if the accelerated roadmap has been put in place, because of AMD's current market strength, Calder told the AP that Intel's "intention is to ramp our products and go to market as quickly as possible." The quote continues: "But are we in an intense competitive environment right now? Absolutely."

Tulsa will be based on Intel's new "Core" micro architecture and will be available in configurations for four-processor and eight or more processor systems (4P and 8P+). This segment has been one of Intel's weakest product segments in the past three years, opening the door for AMD to capture market shares with its Opteron processor especially in the higher-end server market.

Tulsa will debut as dual-core processor with 16 MB of L3 cache and is expected to be available as quad-core in the first half of 2007. Today's 8P systems with 16 (8x2) cores could move to more than 32 physical cores within less than a year.

Intel already has begun shipments of its first Core-based microprocessors to system vendors. The Xeon DP 5100 series with Woodcrest is expected top debut first sometime in July, with the desktop processor Core 2 Duo rumored to be following on 23 July. The mobile Core 2 Duo 5000 and 7000 series will follow shortly thereafter.