Skulltrail in its first revision appeared in February 2008 and Intel's enthusiast platform was one of the first dual-CPU systems for the retail market in a very long time. Although, Skulltrail with dual Intel Extreme QX9775 processors and D5400XS motherboard was hardly within reach for most mortals. The platform used the Xeon socket LGA771 to make two processors able to operate together and even if the price was pretty macabre the performance in multithreaded environments was astonishing, something Intel is betting even harder on with Skulltrail 2.
Skulltrail 2 would of course use the latest Nehalem architecture and according to the source Intel is thinking of using the server processor Nehalem-EX that sports eight physical cores and HyperThreading, which would result in no less than 16 cores and support for 32 threads all in all.
Intel's first Skulltrail platform
With two of these monster processors you would get a total L3 cache of 48MB and eight channels DDR3 memory bus with up to 102GB/s memory bandwidth, pretty terrifying numbers for a so called desktop system.
At the time of writing there are no confirmed information that says Intel is working on a Skulltrail 2 platform, but it doesn't sound all too unbelieveable and even if most will never get the money to buy a rig like that you can always dream.
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Skulltrail 2 with Nehalem-EX rumored
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