Hah. "300Mhz? that was between PPro and P2, they didn't have Xeon then" ... and then go read the article and realize that yes, i really would've been more interested in reading about 20 year old Intel secrets than modern ones.
Does anyone know what is the reason for this many SKUs? Marketing, production issues, or both?
Chips with fewer working cores or lower frequency are definitely easier/cheaper to produce and customers have a range of different needs. Xeon SP is ~90% of the server market so that's a pretty large and diverse market.