Vendor Spotlight:

DUAL-CORE ITANIUM CHIP PRODUCTION CHANGES INTEL'S PLANS

Eager to unveil processors with two cores on one silicon piece, Intel has canceled the next generation of its Pentium desktop and Xeon server chips. The respectively code-named Tejas and Jayhawk chips, originally scheduled to debut in 2005, will be virtually unnecessary with the release of the Intel dual-core processors.

The work already done on the chips will help to speed along the dual-processor release schedule and the engineers will be working now on the dual-core processor project. Montecito, the dual-core Itanium chip is expected to be released mid-2005, and the yet-to-be-named dual-core processors will be released soon after.

Intel realized that releasing Tejas and Jayhawk and expecting customers to standardize on the processors would not make much sense if followed by the dual-core chips. By 2006, dual-core chips will be included in Intel's entire line of processors.