Slashdot Mirror
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."
It might.
But you're going to need four of these plus a 1 terabyte hard drive plus 100 gigs of memory to run VISTA service pack 2.
Get used to it...
Strides are being made, but know massive breakthroughs.
But HOW do I know them?
and will suffer a major component failure in 20% of the time. On the plus side, this will make the startup of a jvm much faster to make java based applications nearly useable.
For raytracing and much scientific computing it will still be cheaper to buy more machines add more cores and get a lot better performance ;).
:).
The 5GHz CPU will be good for computing tasks that cannot take advantage of many cores AND where a 5GHz x85 is a good match. Example: some games and single threaded CPU intensive desktop apps.
If you have lots of money and need to solve not so parallelizable problems quickly you might choose an IBM POWER6 computer instead
It's not all good if you ran the same jobs and got different answers after 6 days :)