Hooz over at 2CPU got to play with Intel's upcoming Xeon 5100-series CPU's and the Woodcrest chipset it's paired with. Demspey Xeons run on a 1066MT/s front-side-bus (FSB), while the new Woodcrest processors FSB has been bumped to 1333MT/s. Since Intel has opted not to follow AMD's lead and put the memory controller on the processor itself, the FSB increase is designed to increase memory bandwidth, plain and simple. Hopefully having the larger, shared cache and better prefetching will allow Woodcrest to depend a little less on the memory interface speed, but in any event... It's faster anyway. Not for everyone, but it's still fascinating technology...well, at least I think so.
