Intel has confirmed another delay in the delivery of its Pentium II Xeon processor, this time affecting a 450MHz version of the chip that is due to ship later this year.
The chip giant will ship the 450MHz processor in the fourth quarter as planned, but only for use in workstations and servers that use one or two processors. Customers looking for powerful four-way servers using the 450MHz chip will have to wait until the beginning of 1999, said Intel spokeswoman Angie Windheim.
The company pushed back the release of the four-way compatible chip in order to carry out more testing, Windheim said.
Xeon is the Pentium II processor that Intel hopes will make it more of a player in the high-end computing market, but has caused problems for the chip maker since it was released on June 29.
Xeon was released with two chip sets: the 440GX, which allows it to be used in one- and two-way systems, and the 450NX, which allows it to scale to four-processor servers and above. At least two bugs, or erratum, in the way Xeon works with the 450NX chipset forced Intel to postpone until earlier this month the release of two 400MHz versions of the chip for use in four-way servers.
