14 DAY TRIAL // About a year ago, the giant chip manufacturer Intel announced its Skulltrail platform at IDF in Taipei. There are only two weeks left until this year's event, October 20-21, and news on the Web says that the company is expected to unveil some information on a fresh Skulltrail platform, a Nehalem-based, which will probably make its way to the market sometime in early 2009. And I'm sure everybody can remember the old platform, which featured two quad-core processors and was capable of handling 16 threads at the same time.
The new Skulltrail should have the same impact as its predecessor, especially if it still features support for both ATI's CrossFire and NVIDIA's SLI multi-GPU configurations. The old platform, designed for workstations, was meant to be a killer behemoth, and it undoubtedly managed to do so. It came with dual sockets, eight cores, four graphics card slots, and dual 1600MHz front-side busses with a total of 25.6GB/s of bandwidth. Needless say more.
There is not much information available on the Core i7-flavored version of the Skulltrail enthusiast platform, and it’s not sure whether Intel is cooking it up now, yet it appears to do so. The next-generation Skulltrail is expected to feature triple channel memory for each socket, while the memory controller will be integrated into the processor. The CPUs will support Hyper Threading, which means that they will chew up 16 threads if we're talking quad-core again.
The word is that Skulltrail’s successor will be based on new Xeon processors with the Nehalem EX-architecture. Considering that it may also come with CrossFire and SLI support, the platform will probably be the most expensive product around, also the fastest. The chip manufacturer didn't comment on the news, yet it is highly expected to confirm it. If it is so, all that remains to be seen is whether there will be applications able to take advantage of this raw power.