CPU
February 4, 2008
Skulltrail: A Preview of Intel's Beast
By Loyd Case Rate it Yourself
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Skulltrail.
We're not sure who thinks up these names. It brings to mind visions of worlds where dark mages do battle with Paladins for world domination. Maybe that's what Intel had in mind when they came up with the name.
In reality, Skulltrail is more of a workaholic engineer, devoted to getting the most done in the least amount of time. Skulltrail is a little short on the people skills, a little too loud, but like the geeky programmer who can write ten times as much code as his peers, Skulltrail gets the job done. Our beefy friend doesn't play a lot, but when he does, he delivers the same intensity as with work—but like workaholics, isn't quite as polished on the play side of the equation.
When you get down to brass tacks, Skulltrail is an engineering workstation with some added chrome to be a pretty high-end gaming system. But its primary mission in life is to bring eight cores to bear on tough computational problems. The added chrome is welcome, however. Last year, we looked at a Xeon workstation built around the Intel S5000VXN. This was purely a system for work, however—its ability to run games was somewhat limited, partly due to lack of SLI support and partly because of memory bandwidth issues.
We took a Skulltrail platform, built a system, then tested it as both a workstation platform and for gaming. But before we dive into the numbers game, let's take a look at the platform.
Today, we'll be looking at Skulltrail from the perspective of a workstation platform. In a few days, we'll take a closer look at Intel's dual socket system as a PC gaming system.
