Intel Caneland, Tigerton demoed and pictured

These products are still a ways off on its roadmap, but Intel already has working preliminary hardware for its next-gen Caneland server platform and Tigerton quad-core processor. TR editor Geoff Gasior is visiting Intel’s offices in Oregon, and he sent along these pictures from a live demo of four Tigerton processors running in a quad-socket, Caneland-based system.

Above are pictures of the guts of the system from two angles. Notice the four CPU coolers grouped together across the length of the case. Such a layout would likely be impossible without Caneland’s point-to-point connection between the chipset and the CPU. Tucked under the a metal cutout is the chipset cooler. Here’s a closer look at it.

Four sockets with quad-core processors in them adds up to 16 cores, each of them a Core microarchitecture-derived design. Intel cooked up a demo of POV-Ray running on one core and then distributing the rendering load across all sixteen. Here’s how it looked, with results.

As expected, doing rendering across 16 cores is exceptionally fast, although I’m unsure about the reasons for a performance boost of more than 16X. At any rate, Caneland and Tigerton are already alive and kicking in Intel’s labs, as this live demonstration illustrates.