Intel is sticking with its roadmap for the quadcore Tigerton and demonstrated a server running four of the little blighters on Friday, according to reports. Quad-core processors for single processor and dual processor systems are due to appear sometime after Halloween.

But while Intel has moved its lines to its Core architecture, top-end server customers are still making do with the veteran Netburst microarchitecture, which still underpins the recently launched Tulsa products. (We could discuss Itanium here. But we won't)

Tigerton is the product that will complete the Xeon range's shift to multicore. In a briefing in San Francisco last week, the vendor powered up a server running four Tigertons, meaning the beast was running 16 cores in total. The system was running the Clarksboro chipset, which means individual links between each chip and the chipset, and ends those worries about bottlenecks.

So, clearly, Intel is pretty confident about the technology. Confident enough to bring forward the release date for four way systems? Ah, not exactly. It's still going to be the second half of next year before they hit the market. ®