Foster
In mid-2001, the Xeon brand was introduced ("Pentium" was dropped from the name). The initial variant that used the new NetBurst architecture, "Foster", was slightly different from the desktop Pentium 4 ("Willamette"). It was a decent chip for workstations, but for server applications it was almost always outperformed by the older Cascades 2 MB core and AMD's Athlon MP. Combined with the need to use expensive Rambus Dynamic RAM, the Foster's sales were somewhat unimpressive.
At most two Foster processors could be accommodated in a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system built with a mainstream chipset, so a second version (Foster MP) was introduced with a 1 MB L3 cache and the Jackson Hyper-Threading capacity. This improved performance slightly, but not enough to lift it out of third place. It was also priced much higher than the dual-processor (DP) versions. The Foster shared the 80528 product code with Willamette.
| Model | Speed (GHz) | L2 Cache (KB) | FSB (MT/s) | TDP (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.4 | 256 | 400 | 56 | |
| 1.5 | 256 | 400 | 59.2 | |
| 1.7 | 256 | 400 | 65.8 | |
| 2.0 | 256 | 400 | 77.5 |
Prestonia
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 512 KB 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 533 MT/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.
Gallatin
Subsequent to the Prestonia was the "Gallatin", which had an L3 cache of 1 MB or 2 MB. Its Xeon MP version also performed much better than the Foster MP, and was popular in servers. Later experience with the 130 nm process allowed Intel to create the Xeon MP branded Gallatin with 4 MB cache. The Xeon branded Prestonia and Gallatin were designated 80532, like Northwood.
