Tigerton Will Have Barcelona to Contend with
Tigerton is the codename of the high-end Xeon multiprocessor CPU that debuts in the third quarter, scheduled for “the beginning of September”.
Tigerton will introduce the Core microarchitecture to 4-way servers and up.
There will be dual-core and quad-core Tigerton CPUs. Quad-core Tigerton shall predominate. Two dual-core Tigerton parts compare to six quad-core Tigerton models.
It wasn’t long ago that Intel launched Tigerton’s predecessor. Largely thanks to its potentially huge cache–16 MB–and transistor count, Tulsa is a great performer. However, it also consumes a lot of power. It wasn’t supposed to offer enough to make Opteron customers switch.
Tigerton shall have Barcelona to deal with. Barcelona is a dual-processor and a multi-processor design. It shall be interesting to see how the Core microarchitecture stacks up against a native quad-core MP processor that, unlike Core, is designed specifically for servers.
There will be overlap between Tulsa and Tigerton. At launch, Tigerton shall only account for about 15% of Intel MP parts. Even in the fourth quarter, barely more Tigerton CPUs shall ship than Tulsa.