Oh look, another EVGA board...

[Blauhung]

go ask around at intel
they stumbled with skulltrail and fell on their face, this time they could finally get it right, but they didnt touch it...

francois?

btw, i think jacob meant that you can use two entirely different cpus as in one with a higher multi than the other. OR two identical ones and run them at different multis. should work... might cause problems with cache and qpi syncing... but i doubt that.

i really hope evga can get i7 chips working on it... that would be so kick4ss

From talking with some people internally, They really did the best they could with skulltrail and honestly it was the fastest thing you could get for a desktop that would serve this community. But the business group that does board design is always under lots of top down pressure to make money, and the Skulltrail project turned out to be a loss. For the time they spent working on it, not enough people bought one to make it worth it.

You could say that the platform just wasn't capable of being something that you would end up turning a profit on, and I venture a guess that EVGA might end up cutting really close to making money on this board as well, but overall it is all about publicity and if the board puts out the best possible #'s for a extended period of time then its done its job. I think as a company, EVGA stands to profit far more from having good publicity surrounding this kind of project as a much higher % of their customers will hear about their success here. For Intel and specificly the group dealing with mobo design and marketing. High end sales is a much smaller % of the boards we put into customers hands and it just ends up not looking like a success to the people watching the bottom line.

It's unfortunate that this is how things work as I'm sure we could have put out something wonderful as well.


Oh and to answer the question...

Do not count on running desktop chips on this
-1st off, you wouldn't be able to run 2 of them because the Xenon chips are linked directly to eachother through their dual QPI's so that you can do a NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) type memory architecture. Basically this allows CPU1 to ask CPU2 for something stored in RAM in the event that its not in the RAM directly accessed by CPU1's controller. Without this link, i7's would be at a performance disadvantage as they would have to rely entirely on inteligently placing only stuff that the proper CPU would use in the correct stack of memory otherwise it strikes out and has to run to disk again.
-2nd, running 1 i7 chip in a board like this would be kinda silly