Meet Intel's Tigertown

Imagine a four way Woodcrest, and you have an idea of what you are in for. The interesting things are not in the macro structures, it simply looks like many other four ways, but in the details.

First, look at the north bridge on the mobo, it is huge and made of solid copper. Other than being a dead ringer for a landing pod from several anime series, it is meant to dissipate a good deal of heat. The chipset is basically Blackford extended to four ways. Blackford was about a 35W part, so if you extend it out to four FSBs, crank up the speed to switch between four of those, and possibly up the clock a little, you end up with a lot more than 35W.

On the positive side, you don't need more FBD channels, and you can lose a lot of duplicate functionality. The added snoop filter cache doesn't eat much power, and process tech has moved on. Factor in a shrink, and you are at 50 or so watts.

One other thing that stands out is the HSFs on the CPUS themselves, you will notice that they are not copper monsters,they are interlocked aluminium monsters. That should tell you a bit about the power consumed, about the same as a Woodcrest or Clovertown.

Last up comes our biggest fear for the system, board cost. This is due to the pin count of the north bridge, and the problems routing four FSBs, all that power, and the lights for the landing pod. This thing is going to have a lot of pins, which means a lot of layers. As you can see, it is a big board, and big with a lot of layers means expensive.

A visual inspection of the edge of the board showed it is pretty damn thick, I would say easily 10 layers, maybe 12. Tigertown will sell into a very cost insensitive market, four ways are not cheap, but if it performs as I think it will, this becomes much less of a problem. Still, look for easy four figure mobos.

In closing, all we have to say is what appears to be an inside joke
"Good things about Clovertown".
"Good things about Clovertown".
"Good things about Clovertown".
"Good things about Clovertown".
"Good things about Clovertown".
"Good things about Clovertown". µ