Intel in the GHz Game Again - Skulltrail Hits 5 GHz

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."

Comments

Re:MHz wars are over

[Firethorn]

This sounds a lot like a '640k' quote to me.

A properly functioning word processor can already do pretty much everything 99.99% of what a user asks of it as fast as the user can tell it to do something, even on the bottom line processor.

Today's video games, sure, aren't going to benefit much from multicore. But I disagree that the benefits for future games will top out at 2. I mean - you could have 1 core handling user input and processing, 1 core handling the physics enviroment, 1 core for unit AI, 1 core for graphics information. There's a quad core right there.

Business and scientific apps will see some beyond that, but memory tends to be the bottleneck there- we'd be better off increasing memory bandwidth and latency than clock speed

Then they can start worrying about beefing up memory bandwidth - I've read about some technologies in the pipe that will help with this. And the scientific community can always use more bandwidth - they are one of the larger users of supercomputers, and this might take a project from 'Need to rent 24hrs on the supercomputer for $$$' to 'I can run this on my work computer for a month/week to get the same results for $'.