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Hardware More Intel "Tigerton" Demonstrations
Anh Tuan Huynh (Blog) - October 25, 2006 3:56 PM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 24 comment(s) - last by catbert.. on Oct 26 at 11:31 AM

Image courtesy of Tech Report

Image courtesy of 2cpu
Sixteen cores of multi-threading goodness

TechReport has the scoop on Intel’s upcoming Tigerton Core architecture-based Xeon MP processors and Caneland server platform. The TechReport article has plenty of images of Intel’s four-way Caneland motherboard.

Intel’s upcoming Caneland server platform features a new point-to-point connection between processors and the chipset allowing the processors to be grouped together. Four Tigerton processors are installed in the Caneland system for a total of sixteen cores of multithreading goodness.

Supporting the four Tigerton processors is Intel’s upcoming Clarksboro chipset. The upcoming chipset appears to dissipate plenty of heat and is shown with a fairly large all copper active cooled heat sink. Intel also demonstrated the performance of its Caneland system with POV-Ray Raytracing Rendering tests. The benchmark showed Tigerton delivering performance improvements greater than 16 times with the multi-threaded benchmark compared to the single-thread benchmark.

It is unknown what the system configuration and clock speeds of the demo systems were. Nevertheless, Tigerton lives and is expected next year.

Update 10/26/2006: 2CPU was also present and reports the Tigerton processors were clocked at 2.66 GHz.

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nice
By Ecmaster76 on 10/25/2006 4:19:05 PM , Rating: 2
Thats one wicked looking board.

Think how many video cards you could cram in there.




RE: nice
By PT2006 on 10/25/2006 4:24:02 PM , Rating: 2
Octo-SLI?


RE: nice
By HaZaRd2K6 on 10/25/2006 4:30:12 PM , Rating: 2
I like the sound of that. Today: 2 cores = 2 GPUs...Next year: 16 cores = 16 GPUs? *drool*


RE: nice
By Hydrofirex on 10/25/2006 5:09:05 PM , Rating: 1
Yeah, that's a great idea... NOT. Can you imagine the cost?

HfX


RE: nice
By regnez on 10/25/2006 6:47:30 PM , Rating: 3
and the power requirements.


RE: nice
By Duwelon on 10/25/2006 6:57:28 PM , Rating: 5
WTB: 1.21 Jiggawatt Powersupply!


RE: nice
By bobdelt on 10/25/2006 9:47:18 PM , Rating: 2
1.21 jigawatts!!!

get the time flux capacitor!!!!


RE: nice
By Lord Evermore on 10/25/2006 7:53:07 PM , Rating: 3
Only 7 slots. And those definitely aren't x16.

But at least Sapphire could introduce a line called "Septic".


RE: nice
By Etern205 on 10/25/2006 9:44:21 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah they aren't x16 but more like x4.
Just curious with a few parts on this board...
Does anyone know on the left-hand side is that
a slot for those riser boards or is that actually a
PCIe x16? And next to the NB (assuming that is) you
can see there are like these 2 identical chips, anyone
have a idea as what they are?


RE: nice
By Lord Evermore on 10/26/2006 7:35:40 AM , Rating: 2
X16 slot would be aligned with the x4 slots, just longer, so that's got to be a riser for something. Maybe a system monitoring/remote access card? The only thing I can think of for the 2 chips (the silver heatsink is the southbridge, the northbridge has a copper heatsink the size of an old Athlon sink and a giant fan, tucked up behind the CPUs) is SCSI controllers, but I don't know why they'd use two, and the picture is too low resolution to be sure if there are connectors.


RE: nice
By Thorburn on 10/26/2006 8:28:35 AM , Rating: 2
I think the slot on the far left is for a memory riser if what I remember from the Paxville MP system I worked on once still holds true.


RE: nice
By catbert on 10/26/2006 11:31:26 AM , Rating: 2
I would have to agree that it is for a memory riser card; as I don't see any memory in the photo. I think the amount of memory you would want in this beast would take up the majority of several pictures.


RE: nice
By DigitalFreak on 10/26/2006 8:01:15 AM , Rating: 2
I would say those two chips are either bridges or PCI-Express switches.


RE: nice
By FoxFour on 10/25/2006 9:50:03 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
But at least Sapphire could introduce a line called "Septic".


That, sir, was an excellent burn.



clusters
By Lazarus Dark on 10/25/06, Rating: 0
RE: clusters
By mattsaccount on 10/25/2006 4:45:53 PM , Rating: 2
Hmm, I don't necessarily agree about cluster computing being dead. This kind of system would run you 10's of thousands of dollars. If your application is highly parallelizable and requires minimal communication between threads, a cluster of more 1P boxes might outperform it and cost less.


RE: clusters
By othercents on 10/25/2006 7:00:21 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah clustering isn't dead and probably won't ever die. As computer performance increases then the need for performance is going to increase. Applications get more intense and you will start to see clusters of 16 core processors just to squeeze as much performance out of it. At some point there is a decrease in performance unless you have a wicked backbone to run the application off of.

Other


RE: clusters
By saratoga on 10/25/2006 7:27:00 PM , Rating: 2
Not at all. Multicore makes clusters more attractive, not less, since now you can get 2 (and soon 4x) as many nodes per $$$.

Even better, since some of the nodes share access to local memory (and even cache), performance per node can be increased in some types of problems by exploiting faster communication between local cores.


that looks wrong??
By aguilpa1 on 10/26/2006 9:23:12 AM , Rating: 2
Does it look like the heat of one CPU heatsink is going into the next one which is then going into the next one...etc. That would make the last two, extremely HOT.

Maybe its just hard to see but that doesn't make sense.




RE: that looks wrong??
By ShapeGSX on 10/26/2006 10:55:03 AM , Rating: 2
The airflow goes front to back, not side to side.


TigerTRON
By otispunkmeyer on 10/26/2006 4:14:56 AM , Rating: 3
is such a better name than tigerton. tigertron gives it that transformers robots in disguise air




uber hax
By Soviet Robot on 10/25/2006 7:12:01 PM , Rating: 2
Can it encode a DVD into DivX in under 5 minutes?