Although we're still about a year away from the actual launch, Intel was showing off a running Lynnfield system during IDF. The demo wasn't exactly what we'd call impressive, as the system was just running a copy of Evans & Sutherland Glaze 3.0, which is a fairly old OpenGL application, as you can see from the screen shot below (the application is dated 1998).

Despite this, you can see the four cores running as well as four Hyper Threading threads in the Windows task manager's CPU usage meter. There were no details on the system itself, but at least it shows that the CPUs are working, despite the early silicon.

In related news, the Lynnfield and Havendale processors will rely on Intel's QPI for internal communications between the CPU core and the PCIe bus. In the case of the Havendale, the CPU and IGP will be two separate parts, much like the Core 2 Quad design where two CPU cores are "glued" together. This will allow for more flexible CPU/graphics combinations and a wide range of SKUs.

However, as QPI isn't an I/O interface, the IGP part of the Havendale has to go via the PCIe bus, rather than communicating directly with the CPU core. This might sound slightly complicated, but the design makes sense and it will allow Intel to reduce the production costs of this dual-core Nehalem-derived CPU.