Well, everything indicates that the upcoming AMD Phenom processor family launch is of no concern to Intel Company. Otherwise, how could we explain the fact that at this IDF Intel paid special attention to their new platform that is positioned as the primary competitor to FASN8. I am talking about high-performance dual-socket solution for dedicated computer enthusiasts.

So, according to the information revealed at the forum Intel is going to launch their Skulltrail platform, high-performance workstation adapted for gaming community needs, in late 2007 ¨C early 2008.

Skulltrail will be built around a Seaburg based mainboard. Since this chipset is initially designed for dual-processor workstations, this board will support two quad-core Xeon processors from Penryn family with 1600MHz bus. It is important to point out that according to the internal chipset architecture each processor is connected to the chipset North Bridge via a dedicated bus. Also the board supports quad-channel memory subsystem consisting of four DDR2 FB-DIMM memory slots.

This mainboard can serve as a basis for the gaming platform thanks to four fully-fledged PCI Express x16 slots that should support SLI and Quad SLI, according to Intel. However, it doesn¡¯t necessarily mean that SLI support will appear in all Intel chipsets from now on, we are talking only about one particular mainboard at this time.

To back up these words, Intel demonstrated a prototype Skulltrail system, that at this time features only two Nvidia graphics cards inside, because the driver for Quad SLI support is not completely ready yet. However, there were two quad-core Xeon processors based on 45nm Harpertown core with unlocked clock frequency multiplier. And thanks to the high-end Vapochill LS1 phase-cooling system these processors were overclocked by simple multiplier increase to 4.0GHz speed.

Overclocked to 4.0GHz Skulltrail system

CPUs run at -50C thanks to Vapochill LS1 cooling system

the CPU is not yet recognized correctly

On Tuesday Pat Gelsinger demonstrated another similar Skulltrail system at his keynote presentation. Although that one ran on a non-overclocked processor working at 3.0GHz speed and utilized water-cooling system.

Intell Skulltrail at 3.0GHz default speed

And to prove that this system boasts remarkable frequency potential and is very promising overall, they overclocked it to 4.0GHz by just raising the clock multiplier a little. Yeah, I guess it would hardly make sense to hope that Intel¡¯s workstation mainboard could allow raising the FSB frequency :)

I have to stress that Intel didn¡¯t really feel like sharing any indepth performance data for this system as well as for single Yorkfield processors with us. Maximum what we managed to get were the results of a few benchmarks where Skulltrail running at default working frequency was compared against single Yorkfield processor. The test configurations of these systems were as follows:

Skulltrail system:

• 2 x pre-production 45nm Hi-k Intel quad-core Harpertown processors (3.4GHz, 1600MHz FSB, 12MB cache);
• Skulltrail dual-socket mainboard
• 2 Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards in SLI mode;
• 2x2GB DDR2-800 CL5 FB DIMM modules from Micron;
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB HDD.

Single-Yorkfield system:

• Pre-production 45nm Hi-k Intel quad-core Yorkfield processor (3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB cache);
• Intel X38 based mainboard
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card;
• 2x1GB Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX DIMM modules;
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB HDD.

Skulltrail	Single-Yorkfield
CINEBENCH R10 Beta CPU Benchmark
3DMark06 V1.1.0 Pro

The results of these tests showed excellent system scalability improving even better with the increase of the number of CPUs from one to two. However, we are talking only about the tests optimized for multithreaded workload and not loading the memory subsystem too heavily. And the memory subsystem based on DDR2-800 FB-DIMM is a true weak spot of Skulltrail platform. So, let¡¯s not draw any final conclusions at this time.