onethreehill
04-16-2007, 09:03 PM
An unusual announcement came out of IDF today about Intel’s upcoming Skulltrail platform. Skulltrail is effectively a competitor to AMD’s Quad FX platform, it is a dual socket motherboard capable of supporting two quad-core CPUs. Intel lists Skulltrail has having support for “four PCI Express slots”, which we can only assume means four PCIe x16 slots.
Skulltrail won’t make its debut until later this year and Intel isn’t confirming whether or not it uses LGA-775 chips or Xeons. The predecessor to Skulltrail is Intel’s V8 platform, originally demonstrated at CES 2007 in Las Vegas, and unfortunately that platform requires the use of Xeon CPUs. Since it’s effectively a Xeon based workstation platform, you’re stuck with using FB-DIMMs which are hardly desirable from a cost, performance or thermal standpoint when building an enthusiast class PC. We do hope that Skulltrail severs the tie with Xeon/FB-DIMMs but we are quite suspicious of Intel’s lack of full disclosure today at IDF.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2968
Skulltrail won’t make its debut until later this year and Intel isn’t confirming whether or not it uses LGA-775 chips or Xeons. The predecessor to Skulltrail is Intel’s V8 platform, originally demonstrated at CES 2007 in Las Vegas, and unfortunately that platform requires the use of Xeon CPUs. Since it’s effectively a Xeon based workstation platform, you’re stuck with using FB-DIMMs which are hardly desirable from a cost, performance or thermal standpoint when building an enthusiast class PC. We do hope that Skulltrail severs the tie with Xeon/FB-DIMMs but we are quite suspicious of Intel’s lack of full disclosure today at IDF.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2968