Intel Xeon UP/DP (Prestonia) processors
Introduction: February 2002
Overview
The Xeon brand refers to many families of Intel's x86 multiprocessing CPUs - for dual-processor (DP) and multi-processor (MP) configuration on a single motherboard targeted at non-consumer markets of server and workstation computers, and also at blade servers and embedded systems. The Xeon brand has been maintained over several generations of x86 and x86-64 processors. Older models added the Xeon moniker to the end of the name of their corresponding desktop processor, but more recent models used the name Xeon on its own. The Xeon CPUs generally have more cache than their desktop counterparts in addition to multiprocessing capabilities. Intel's (non-x86) IA-64 processors are called Itanium, not Xeon.
The Prestonia core
In 2002 Intel released a 130 nm version of Xeon branded CPU, codenamed "Prestonia". It supported Intel's new Hyper-Threading technology and had a 512KB L2 cache. This was based on the "Northwood" Pentium 4 core. A new server chipset, E7500 (which allowed the use of dual-channel DDR SDRAM) was released to support this processor in servers, and soon the bus speed was boosted to 533MT/s (accompanied by new chipsets: the E7501 for servers and the E7505 for workstations). The Prestonia performed much better than its predecessor and noticeably better than Athlon MP. The support of new features in the E75xx series also gave it a key advantage over the Pentium III Xeon and Athlon MP branded CPUs (both stuck with rather old chipsets), and it quickly became the top-selling server/workstation processor. The Xeon branded Prestonia and Gallatin were designated 80532, like Northwood.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.