On November 5, 2006, Icrontic ran an introspection on the future of the Core 2 architecture in the mobile, desktop and enterprise markets. Throughout the investigative process, we predicted that Intel’s Tigerton would debut in 2H07 to be followed by the Yorkfield-inspired Harpertown. While we were correct on the release date for the Tigerton, we were a few months out on the Harpertown which appeared in late 2007. Yet more presciently, we spoke of the arrival of the scarcely-detailed Dunnington core and predicted its arrival after that of Tigerton and Harpertown.

Beyond Tigerton, the situation is very hard to determine: Harpertown is mentioned as the server version of Yorkfield which we will discuss below, but the information available on Harpertown
suggests that it is just Yorkfield with more cache and a better FSB as has been the case with virtually every Xeon in the last five years. We’ll touch more on the disparity in the desktop section. Names also floated in the last twelve months include Dunnington as a successor to Tigerton
and Gainestown which we were unable to find concrete information for.

We touched on the Dunnington again on February 23, 2008 predicting that it would be the last Penryn-based Xeon prior to the arrival of the long-awaited Nehalem core set to debut late this year. We mentioned that it was to be a monolithic septo-core processor launching as a drop-in for the existing Caneland platform.

Intel finally launched Dunnington yesterday, placing all six cores on a single die, rather than three Penryn dies as most expected. As we predicted, it is indeed a drop-in for the Caneland platform and can be configured in servers boasting up to 96 concurrent cores.

Taking up the Xeon 7400-series flag, lots of 1000 are priced between $856 and $2,729. The processors are expected to be shipping in volume immediately.