SkullTrail has Xeon Sockets, Desktop Processors
Sunday, September 30th, 2007Intel demonstrated a SkullTrail system at IDF. SkullTrail is a high-end desktop with SLI graphics and two quad-core CPUs. That’s eight cores total.
SkullTrail is designed for Intel’s next-generation Penryn processors.
The SkullTrail motherboard had two LGA-771 sockets. These are Xeon workstation and server sockets. However, the processors used were the desktop processors codenamed Yorkfield.
Some analysts have commented that they do not think there is any difference between the quad-core Yorkfield and its quad-core server counterpart called Harpertown. Both Yorkfield and Harpertown are based on the same process technology and the same second-generation microarchitecture, so they are very similar. However, according to Intel, “there are slight differences in the hardware prefetchers in Xeon vs. desktop Core 2″ (p. 2).
SkullTrail also featured SLI from NVIDIA. SLI was made possible by putting two media and communications processors (MCPs) on the motherboard. “This isn’t an SLI licensing deal; this is Intel purchasing NVIDIA MCPs” (p. 2).
Intel still does not own a license for SLI. So if Intel can do it this way, why can’t others?
SkullTrail, like the V8 before it, performs remarkably well for those applications that take advantage of eight cores. It’s a question of performance vs. “price, power and noise” (p. 2).
