The Pentium III Xeon will increase in speed as the year moves forward. By mid-April, 700 and 800MHz large cache Xeons should be released, priced at up to a whopping $3692 for a single Pentium III Xeon 800/100/2M when purchased in quantities of 1000. The cost of cache memory that can run at 800MHz is astronomical.

As for the 133MHz system bus versions of the Pentium III Xeon, they are currently shipping at up to 866MHz. By the end of the year they will reach 1GHz, and speeds should increase beyond that for the low-end of the workstation market. Because the cache is on-die, the price of a currently shipping 866MHz is a relatively inexpensive $794 each when purchased in quantities of 1000.

Foster, matched up with the Colusa chipset, is Intel's replacement for the Pentium III Xeon. We expect Foster to have a similar relationship to the consumer Willamette processor as the Xeon does to the regular Pentium III. As with the Xeon, there will be several versions. For one and two CPU systems, Intel should ship at 1.4GHz in late Q4, 2000, moving to 1.5GHz or faster in Q1, 2001. It will come loaded with 256K of on-die L2 cache. This Foster will most likely be quite similar to the consumer Willamette.