Intel Skulltrail

Intel demonstrated Skulltrail at the Fall 2007 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, California, and at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Skulltrail has a front side bus rate of 400 MHz (1600 MHz QDR), and was demonstrated with two 45 nanometer High-κ processors running at 3.2 GHz. During the IDF, a 4.0 GHz phase cooled Skulltrail system was demonstrated. Then on October 22, 2007, the two processors were demonstrated running at 4.4 GHz with water cooling. They were demonstrated again on October 31, 2007, this time running at 5.0 GHz, with phase change cooling. On April 18, 2008, Tom's Hardware, reporting from an Overclocking Enthusiast site, reported that an overclocked speed of 6.006 GHz was achieved on an 8-core Skulltrail setup. ==System components==

Core 2 Extreme QX9775 • Four processor cores in one processor package • 3.2 GHz clock frequency • 1600 MHz FSB • Fabricated on 45 nm process • 12 MiB L2 cache (6 MiB per core pair) Intel D5400XS motherboard • Two LGA 771 CPU sockets (supports Xeon DP processors) • Four FB-DIMM slots supporting maximum 16 GB of system memory at 800 MHz • Four x16 PCI Express 1.1a slots • Two PCI 2.3 slots • Six SATA 3.0 Gbit/s ports • Two eSATA ports • Ten USB ports ==Criticisms and issues==

Although found to be an extremely powerful computing platform, Skulltrail was criticized by media outlets for being "ahead of its time". This is in part due to the lack of support for multi-core computing with almost all popular game engines at the time, in addition to the extremely high price of the components involved. The use of FB-DIMMs due to the workstation chipset has also been pointed at as a major limiting factor for Skulltrail. although this limitation can be mitigated by purchasing specially designed Kingston HyperX FB-DIMMS that have a lower latency than generic FB-DIMMs The base Skulltrail platform consists of an Intel D5400XS mainboard which cost upwards of US$600 when it hit the market as a standalone part. Computers based on the Skulltrail platform also require high-output power supplies for both the CPU and graphics cards, along with a computer chassis capable of accommodating the motherboard, which is based on an Extended ATX form factor design. However, Atomic reported that they could accommodate cheaper Xeon server microprocessors that fit in the LGA-771 socket, which was corroborated by Intel's official processor support list. Intel's Skulltrail D5400XS motherboard was made with two nForce chips. The Skulltrail D5400XS motherboard became now just one of the motherboards available, along with motherboards with X58 and P55 chipsets, that runs both nVidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire platforms out of the box with public hardware drivers. ==References==