Skulltrail doesn't FASN8, it does obliterate

TOWARDS THE END of Kicking Pat's keynote, he showed a spread of new 45nm Penryn platforms, including the anticipated Skulltrail. The second generation V8 platform has two - unlocked supposedly - HarpertownDP chips similar to the ones in our, um, delayed review this morning.

Couple it with "optimised" - read streamline latency and bandwidth at the expense of some RAS features - Seaburg chipset, four OC FB-DIMM sockets (one module per channel) with T1 command rate, and top-notch VRM and board cooling. Then add cascaded dual phase-change - 80 degrees C freeze cooling, we're talking about a potential 5+ GHz, eight-core monster with dual FSB2000+ and (I assume liquid-cooled too) quad-channel DDR2-1000+ CL4 FB-DIMMs. Oh boy...

There are four PCI-E x16 v1 GPU slots on board, created by expanding the 32 PCI-E x16 v2 lanes of Seaburg chipset using twin PCI-E v2->v1 bridges into 64 PCI-E x16 v1 lanes, i.e. four slots. This would give you Quad CrossFire or Quad SLI capability at pretty much full GPU I/O speed, since most near-future GPUs are more than happy with the 16-lane wide PCI-E per GPU.

Intel's man behing the SkullTrail (and the famed Bad Axe D975XBX2 board), the ex-Alienware Eric Cubbage, also showed a bunch of early "Skulltrail friends", among the pioneers to do a part of the first sales units of the new platform from December onwards. These included the UK-based SCAN Computers and the high-end cooling from the very local Vigor Gaming from nearby City of Industry, CA.

Oh boy, how bad it is that there is no AMD FASN8 anytime soon now, at least we could have something to compare the Skulltrail to. µ