ADN

** Massive, blood loss inducing boner**

The Intel Skulltrail



First and foremost, the "Skulltrail" name doesn't represent the platform as a whole, per se. Rather, the moniker is a codename for the D5400XS enthusiast motherboard, the "XS" meaning "Extreme Series". That board is designed to co-exist with two Extreme Quad-Core processors, essentially creating the "platform".

Once launched, the Skulltrail "platform" will be marketed with the D5400XS motherboard and include dual QX9775 LGA771 processors, which settle in at 3.20GHz, similar to the QX9770 LGA775 chip that we evaluated back in November. Although any LGA771 processors will function in the board (Xeon E5410, E5420, et cetera), the QX9775 is the first-ever LGA771 Extreme product.

More: http://snipurl.com/3so5i [techgage_com]

This was interesting in many respects when it was announced some time ago. It has numerous downsides such as power usage, needs expensive ECC ram, poor overclocking and a lack of software supporting 8 cores.

Certainly if you did something like 3D rendering, high end math/statistics or video encoding (x264) it might be worthwhile but for a majority of people the expense for this is hard to justify.

If they update it to be compatible with the new i7 chips with 6 cores then you could have a 12 core system :)