Caneland and Tigerton, Intel preps for battle against AMD’s 4P Opteron

Hillsboro (OR) – Intel today disclosed more details about its final Core microprocessor product – the Tigerton processor : The CPU will go head to head with AMD’s 4P+ Opteron processors, which have dominated the MP processor segment for more than 2 years.

At an event held for press at the company’s fab campus in Hillsboro, Intel provided more details about the upcoming Tigerton processor and Caneland platform. The CPU will be introduced as the “Quad-core Xeon 7300” series brand and is promised to offer roughly twice the performance than the currently sold dual-core Xeon 7100 series (which is based on FSB667 and FSB800 Presler cores and Netburst micro architecture).

While the current Xeons are rated at a power consumption of 95 watts (2.5 GHz and 3.0 GHz) and 150 watts (3.16, 3.33 and 3.50 GHz), Tigerton will come in at significantly lower power consumption down to 50 watt per quad-core CPU. The fastest Tigerton processor available at launch will be clocked at 2.93 GHz, Intel said. The processor integrates 2 x 4 MB L2 cache.

The company did not reveal the launch date, but indicated that a production is imminent, as Tigerton (which will include the 7300 chipset, previously code-named Clarksboro) is already shipping in volume. Company representatives said that pre-qualifications for Caneland began in June with first OEM customers having received the processor and chipset last month as well.

Despite the delay over the 2P processors Woodcrest and Clovertown, it isn’t really a surprise that the company calls Caneland the “the fastest design to production execution of an MP server platform in Intel’s history”. In fact, Intel is likely to introduce the platform ahead of AMD’s quad-core Barcelona processor. For the server space, it will be a critical piece for Intel that aims to retake the firm’s dominance in the MP server space – a segment that Intel lost to the 4P Opteron some time ago, with AMD’s holding well more than 50% of this market, according to market research firms.

When Caneland hits the market and if Intel can keep its promise and make a similar impact in the high-margin 4P space as it did in the 2P segment, than there is yet another good reason for AMD to get Barcelona into the market rather today than tomorrow.