Intel Corp (INTC)

[alan81]

MP explained...
Perhaps some history will help...
In the olden days, you could put a pentium, or even a celeron into a two socket system and it would work just fine. Intel got smart, realizing people building two socket systems would pay more than their desktop customers...so made the XEON brand, and disabled the two socket ability of the Pentium chips.

Later they got even smarter and realized that people building 4 socket systems would pay EVEN more than those building two socket systems... so they split the xeon product line into xeon DP that would work in one or two socket systems, and sold for somewhere between $200 and about $1000/unit. They created a product that would work with up to four sockets, calling it Xeon MP and priced it as high as $3500/unit or so.

With Nehalem, I suspect the primary difference between the DP and MP is the number of CSI links, and hence the number of pins on the package as well. It may be that Xeon MP has eight cores and Xeon DP has four, but that remains to be seen. I suspect the current price points will still hold with the expectatino that Nehalem DP will sell for the $177-$1172 prices, while Nehalem MP will be in the range of $856 to $2301.
For comparison purposed today, all these products are about the same, with just minor features enabled...
Core 2 quad 2.4Ghz sells for $266
Xeon DP quad 2.33Ghz sells for $455
Xeon MP quad 2.4Ghz sells for $1980
--Alan