Xeon 2.8GHz DP & 2.0GHz MP - Part I: Taking over the Enterprise

Xeon DP - Finally with a 533MHz FSB

The Xeon DP family is extended today with the introduction of the first 533MHz FSB parts. The architecure of the Xeon DP is identical to the current 0.13-micron Northwood Pentium 4 CPUs, except you can use them in dual processor systems. This means that these CPUs have the same 512KB on-die L2 cache as the Pentium 4, the same trace cache and now the same 4.2GB/s FSB interface.

As their name implies you can only use these CPUs in single or dual processor configurations; and to make it very certain that you won't be able to use these in quad processor motherboards Intel outfits the Xeon DP processors with an extra pin, making the chips have a 604-pin interface instead of the 603-pin interface of the Xeon MP. The sole purpose of this extra pin is to make certain that you only use Xeon MP processors in 4-way configurations, which is a shame since the Xeon DP processors ship at much higher clock speeds but we'll get to that later.

Socket-604 (Xeon DP)