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Intel in the GHz Game Again - Skulltrail Hits 5 GHz

Posted by Zonk on from the spookily-appropriate-code-name dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Intel's Skulltrail dual-socket enthusiast platform has been making the rounds on the web for half a year or so, but we haven't seen many details yet. TG Daily got a close look at an almost complete prototype, which surely sounds almost like a production ready version, judging from the article. Everything that TG Daily describes sounds like Skulltrail PCs will be very limited in availability and insanely expensive. Intel also has said it has developed 'special' Xeon processors with desktop processor attributes just for Skulltrail. These chips are currently running at a stable 5 GHz."

3 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Excessive? by everphilski · · Score: 2, Informative

    I bought a top of the line processor and quadrupled my RAM the beginning of last year - not for video gaming (although it sure didn't hurt, I play occasionally not very hardcore anymore) but to do scientific computing for my thesis. I did a 6DOF model of a guided bullet, with this spiffy guidance model. 500 monte carlo runs took about 2 hours. I needed to do a ton of sets. All in all, my entire master's dissertation worth of sets took about a month worth of running 16 hours a day on a dual-core machine. And of course I had to do a lot of pre-emptive runs to determine the domain of my problem, etc.

    I still do a lot of scientific computing at home - 6DOF's, playing with CFD, etc. There are plenty of 'hobbyists' out there who can keep a CPU pegged more often than its not ...

  2. Re:Excessive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Not that more is a bad thing but I'm running a Intel E6750 at 3gigs and even that rates a 5.9 on the Vista-Meter (not that Vista is a "reliable" benchmark). Just to let you know that you could have a 5GHz system and you still wouldn't go over 5.9. The scale only goes from 1 to 5.9. it says it on the MS site.

    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/experienceindex.mspx

  3. That's not a bottleneck by piotrr · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am annoyed by references to general "bottlenecks", because it's not just Anonymous Coward who comes up with this.

    It's just not that simple. A 5GHz CPU will be faster than a 3GHz CPU and 3 video cards will be faster than 1 video card almost regardless of other components. The only real bottlenecks you can talk about are the system busses and at the moment, that's not a problem either. HyperTransport 3.0 and intel's quad-pumped busses are still plenty wide enough for 5GHz processors, no sweat.

    I completely understand what you're trying to say, it's just that you're wrong. PCs aren't cars and processors aren't jet engines. A faster CPU will do more CPU work every second, a faster video card will give you higher framerates and more RAM will fix most of your stutters. The slowest part of your computer is the hard disk, so do whatever you can to exclude it from time-critical operations. If the rest of your system is waiting for data from that ancient storage device, THAT would be a bottleneck.

    --
    / Per