Monday, January 14th 2008
Intel Skulltrail Out in February 2008
I'll be brief on this one. Intel Skulltrail is designed to compete against the AMD Quad FX platform. Although the Quad-Father was never popular enough, Skulltrail will share the same idea: dual Socket 771 Xeon processors like the 45nm Harpertown supporting up to 8 processing cores and fully-buffered DIMMs (FB-DIMM). The Skulltrail system will use the upcoming Intel D5400XS motherboard. With two NVIDIA nForce 100 MCP chips, the D5400XS will support up to four PCI Express x16 slots, finally allowing SLI on an Intel motherboard. The motherboard will have a 10-layer PCB with limited production (2000 units reported earlier) and price over US $600. Today's word is that the Intel D5400XS motherboard is scheduled for a launch on WW06. That's short for Work Week 6, tech-speak for the sixth week of 2008. In other words if that's true, expect Skulltrail to be launched somewhere around Febuary 4-9, 2008.
Source:
Tech ARP
52 Comments on Intel Skulltrail Out in February 2008
However, you made me recheck the roadmap, seems it's Q3/4 2008, not 2009. So end 2008 early 2009 would make Nehalem available. Perhaps I should just wait a year and go for some fancy machine then. Only do small upgrades until then.
But it will be interesting to see what extra CPU HP will do for some of the cards in SLI/Crossfire, I guess that setup and handoff for four cards might be different than for one, but for now it seems that larger displays are GPU limited not CPU. So it could make little difference in realworld gaming.
Nehalem-EX (Beckton)[7] MP server 45 nm 8 (16) 24 MB in the last level (L3 or L4) Quad channel FB-DIMM2 4x QuickPath No 90/105/130 W Socket-LS (LGA1567) Q4 2009
That board with DDR3 goodness and overclocking features would rox deh sox.
That thing looks like it belongs in some industrial scale server/terminal machine, in some damp dark basement of some ball bearing factory in backwater China where it would help crunch numbers and complete mundane industrial tasks.
I love you Dan, you know I do. Now come here and give daddy some sugar.
All they need is a driver to do it with they have said.
I bet they'll price it $800~$1000 initially, make huge profits telling "limited quantity". Few months later bring it back telling "We're back with the Skulltrail" and sell them for $500 a unit.
Can any one sudgest a system for me? I work with muti midea not a gamer.
The term "limited quantity" is very deceptive. Nobody actually keeps an eye on how many units are actually made/sold and companies use this as a USP for their products as it adds to the exclusivity of the product. Using this "limited quantity 2000 units" to sell the thing for $800 would be filthy wrong on Intel's part.