Well, everything indicates that the upcoming AMD Phenom processor family launch is of no concern to Intel Company. Otherwise, how could we explain the fact that at this IDF Intel paid special attention to their new platform that is positioned as the primary competitor to FASN8. I am talking about high-performance dual-socket solution for dedicated computer enthusiasts.

So, according to the information revealed at the forum Intel is going to launch their Skulltrail platform, high-performance workstation adapted for gaming community needs, in late 2007 ?early 2008.

Skulltrail will be built around a Seaburg based mainboard. Since this chipset is initially designed for dual-processor workstations, this board will support two quad-core Xeon processors from Penryn family with 1600MHz bus. It is important to point out that according to the internal chipset architecture each processor is connected to the chipset North Bridge via a dedicated bus. Also the board supports quad-channel memory subsystem consisting of four DDR2 FB-DIMM memory slots.

This mainboard can serve as a basis for the gaming platform thanks to four fully-fledged PCI Express x16 slots that should support SLI and Quad SLI, according to Intel. However, it doesn't necessarily mean that SLI support will appear in all Intel chipsets from now on, we are talking only about one particular mainboard at this time.

To back up these words, Intel demonstrated a prototype Skulltrail system, that at this time features only two Nvidia graphics cards inside, because the driver for Quad SLI support is not completely ready yet. However, there were two quad-core Xeon processors based on 45nm Harpertown core with unlocked clock frequency multiplier. And thanks to the high-end Vapochill LS1 phase-cooling system these processors were overclocked by simple multiplier increase to 4.0GHz speed.

Overclocked to 4.0GHz Skulltrail system

CPUs run at -50C thanks to Vapochill LS1 cooling system

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