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."

I guess...

[cesman (74566)]

I guess the skulls in it's trail are the heads of AMD execs.

Re:I guess...

[arivanov (12034)]

No... They are the skulls of White Bears who have fallen through the ice because the water in the arctic got warmed up too much by the water cooling kit this beast requires to operate.

Re:

[Hal_Porter (817932)]

No... They are the skulls of White Bears who have fallen through the ice because the water in the arctic got warmed up too much by the water cooling kit this beast requires to operate.

You could probably render photorealistic White Bears in realtime on this beasty. And do the AI and physics too. Certainly good enough to use them as enemies in a arctic themed FPS.

So it all works out in the long run.

Also, Duncan Hill Coffee

[User 956 (568564)]

Everything that TG Daily describes sounds like Skulltrail PCs will be very limited in availability and insanely expensive.

Obviously, it's the only architecture hand-designed by Dethklok.

Excessive?

[Vexor (947598)]

So this is most likely targeted at gamers because we all know that games generally speaking are the most intensive software ever run on a PC. As far as I know though there is no game on the market that requires anywhere near that kind of horsepower. 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).

On the other hand...will this be out in time for Crysis?

Re:Excessive?

[drix (4602)]

we all know that games generally speaking are the most intensive software ever run on a PC

Not even close. Games, after all, run in realtime. There are many, many applications out there that have no problem pegging top-of-the-line hardware for hours on end: DV editing, raytracing, scientific computing. In fact, the whole reason I'm posting this is because I'm waiting for my PC to solve a big math problem :-)

Re:

[Tim C (15259)]

Not only that, but generally speaking the single most demanding pat of a game is the graphics, and we have dedicated GPUs for that.

I agree with you; games are power-hungry, but by no means the most power-hungry things you can do with a PC. Mind you, I'm weird - I've actually done proper scientific numerical simulation work (and had to leave it running overnight to finish). I've also done video transcoding, and while that doesn't take as long it wasn't quite real-time last time I did it, so there's definitel

Re:

[PitaBred (632671)]

Get a faster machine. My laptop will transcode from a DVD to H264 at right near real-time (sans ratio changes), and it's nothing terribly special.

Re:

[LWATCDR (28044)]

Most people will say games because they are just about the only programs they use that they have to wait on.
But yes your correct. You did leave out data mining and a few other applications.
What is amazing is the size of problems that we are now willing to tackle with desktop hardware.

Re:

[rrohbeck (944847)]

Gamers are probably the only users that are more or less immune to price/performance considerations.

Re:

[p3d0 (42270)]

we all know that games generally speaking are the most intensive software ever run on a PC

Not even close. Games, after all, run in realtime.

So? That's because they are tuned that way. I haven't played this sort of game in a while, but in the day, I remember you could tune the game for your system, and it would take 100% of your CPU, GPU, ALU, FPU, and any other U you wanted to throw at it. How long it runs is entirely irrelevant.

Wasting Time...

[drgonzo59 (747139)]

I'm posting this is because I'm waiting for my PC to solve a big math problem :-)

You are wasting your time, the answer will always be 42....

Re:

[scheme (19778)]

Im pretty sure games stress the whole system overall a lot more than any application im aware of. math problems and ray tracing and DV editing if im not mistaken are CPU exclusive operations. Im not an expert but high end graphics cards are more powerful than cpus, even if they are specialized. i cant think of any other application that will stress the CPU, GPU, RAM, HDD and everything else to 100% other than games.

You are mistaken. Take particle physics simulations for example. The system might be downloading a 10GB dataset to do the next simulation while it's working on simulations of a detector which involves working with the current dataset. The download would max out your net connection while the simulation work would max your cpu and require something like 2-3GB of ram. The two activities are probably generating a decent i/o load as well.

Same deal with audio or video processing, if you're streaming a vi

Re:

[everphilski (877346)]

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

Re:Excessive?

[Luyseyal (3154)]

Not to mention running something like World Community Grid [worldcommunitygrid.org]. I love using my idle processor time to tackle AIDS, Cancer, Muscular Dystrophy, Dengue, etc.

-l

Re:

[Svet-Am (413146)]

flight simulator x would certainly use all of that hardware. how well is a different matter, but FSX is upward scalable for memory, CPU, and GPU.

Traslation

[king-manic (409855)]

These chips are currently running at a stable 5 GHz.

A practical translation:

It will be 20% faster, 200% hotter, needs a 300% nosier fan, consumes 500% as much power.

Yes, but

[paranode (671698)]

The silicon pathways are provided by Monster Cable.

Re:Yes, but

[Cecil (37810)]

And they're made out of superconducting adamantium. As a result, all games played on these processors will have higher quality storylines. It's a little known fact that copper causes destructive interference with the story's sine wave.

Re:

[TemporalBeing (803363)]

These chips are currently running at a stable 5 GHz.

A practical translation:
It will be 20% faster, 200% hotter, needs a 300% nosier fan, consumes 500% as much power.

And yet it will only deliver 33% of the performance.

Re:

[Sebastopol (189276)]

power = heat

if you could make something require 500% more power but convert 200% more energy to heat (ignore photonic emissions), you'd have yourself a nobel prize.

i'm just sayin.

Estimating power at 5GHz

[Tom Womack (8005)]

Tom's Hardware just did a series of power-consumption tests on various overclocks of a Q9650, the first available 45nm processor.

At 3GHz, it uses 8.79W when doing nothing, and 73W when running all four cores flat-out

At 4GHz, it uses 16.83W to do nothing, and 135W with all four cores flat-out; on the other hand this required a voltage increase to 1.44V from the 1.25V that sufficed up to 3.33GHz.

Fitting curves suggests that you would be using something like 350W for four cores at 5GHz, which is quite impressi

Not if it is putting out energy in other forms.

[pavon (30274)]

What king-matic didn't tell you is all that extra power is dissipated via X-Rays. It is called Skulltrail after all.

Insanely expensive...

[by Anonymous Coward]

And will be obsolete in a year. Honestly, who spends thousands of dollars every year for the most advanced stuff? Even if you did have a Skulltrail, the rest of you system would bottleneck it. 3 8800GTX's would be the bottleneck, 8GB's of the fastest DDR3 ram would bottleneck, and your harddrive would bottleneck too. The only thing Skulltrail gives you is bragging rights.

bragging rights

[DreadSpoon (653424)]

To many people that's all they're looking for. It's like buying an F-350 when the most you use a car for is getting groceries, or getting the biggest house you can possibly afford even though you're a small family of three, and so on.

Remember, it's not just the spammers that profit off of people with small penises. Auto manufacturers, TV manufacturers, home builders, and now Intel all profit off of them too. :)

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Remember, it's not just the spammers that profit off of people with small penises. Auto manufacturers, TV manufacturers, home builders, and now Intel all profit off of them too. :)

Ha! I don't buy things from any of those people, and my penis is tiny!

Re:So...

[Bluesman (104513)]

My third party observation is that 99% girls will look at the comfortable and stable guys, wonder why THEY can't find a guy like that, and then hop in the M3 with the asshole.

Confucius say, a small dick is still better than an unused one.

Hertz by themselves are useless

[porkThreeWays (895269)]

Measuring computer performance in Hz is like buying a car based on red line RPMs. It only tells you one component that is meaningless by itself. Just like a car needs torque to give rpm's context, processors need how many instructions can be completed per cycle to be compared to the frequency. I've lost faith in the MHz race and generally look at benchmarks closest to the intended purpose of the processor.

Where did my /. go?

[blueZ3 (744446)]

You just made an almost-sensible car analogy. I didn't think that was allowed here.

MHz wars are over

[geekoid (135745)]

Please, it's all about cores.

Look at the history of processors speed. We've been pretty flat, and will stay that way in all practical manner for a while.
Before someone throws the quote like they are smart, Moore's law refers to transistor not speed.

1) Faster chips require better fabs. Fabs are having difficulty producing better platters with a few enough flaws to produce mass quantities. Strides are being made, but know massive breakthroughs.

2) Multiples cores and real parallel processing development is just starting to become expected knowledge for the average application developer. Lets be honest, a lot of developers don't bother to understand multi-threading and avoid it like a plague. Fortunately there are some IDEs that make it easier for developers.

Re:MHz wars are over

[AuMatar (183847)]

Cores only help so much- if your problem is not paralelizable, or if it is only minimally so, a billion cores won't help. A word processor is not going to work any faster on a 1000 core machine than on a 1 core machine. Video games might see a small speed up from a multicore, but not that much of one- it doesn't break down into equally weighted threads. For the vast majority of users, 2 cores aren't even really utalized (email and web browsing doesn't use 2 cores). I doubt any home user will see much improvement beyond 2 cores, and absolutely none after 4 even for hardcore multitaskers. 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.

Re:MHz wars are over

[Firethorn (177587)]

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 $'.

Re:

[n dot l (1099033)]

Video games might see a small speed up from a multicore, but not that much of one- it doesn't break down into equally weighted threads.

Not at all true. Most of the heavy physics and graphics processing is extremely parallelizable. I've even seen AI computations parallelized. Taking advantage of multi-core is a very hot topic in the game industry right now and I assure you we're far from lacking ideas.

Re:MHz wars are over

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

We have had about 40 years of practice getting one processing unit to pretend to be n, and we're pretty good at it now. We have no good ways (even in theory) of getting n processing units to pretend to be one in the general case. If you have a 5GHz core then you can run two processes on it happily with only a small amount of overhead. If you have two 2.5GHz cores and only one process, you will end up running that process at half of the theoretical speed of your CPU.

Fewer faster cores will always be more flexible than more slower ones. The reason we go with more slower ones is that slower cores use less power (power scales much worse than linearly with speed, so two 1GHz cores will use a lot less power than one 2GHz one). Some workloads are intrinsically parallel (e.g. web serving) and so having lots of cores using less power is a big win. Others are not and so extra cores are just a waste (although you can often consolidate multiple serial tasks onto one machine with lots of cores).

Re:

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

You are missing the point. Any problem that can be solved on a parallel machine can be solved on a serial machine of the same computational power in the same time. The converse, that any problem that can be solved on a serial machine can be solved on a parallel machine of the same processing power, is not true. At the abstract level, any nondeterministic finite automaton can be reduced trivially to a deterministic equivalent, but an arbitrary degree of nondeterminism can not be trivially added to a DFA.

Re:

[Chris Mattern (191822)]

You fought in the MHz wars?

Yes, I was once an AMD knight, the same as your father.

Chris Mattern

what does "desktop processor attributes" mean?

[Thagg (9904)]

I've seen this before, I've never understood it. What does it mean?

Thad

Re:

[Kjella (173770)]

Servers are about making a lot of people happy at a reasonable speed. Desktops are about making one user happy at an extreme speed. A lot of crap is single-threaded or not suitable for parallelization, and the best solution is to push that single thread at maximum speed. That's the only desktop quality of significance I know of. With that said, I have a quad-core and my biggest annoyance right now is disk thrashing. My CPU is usually almost idle, but having a lot of tasks using the disks at the same time sl

Re:what does "desktop processor attributes" mean?

[forkazoo (138186)]

I've seen this before, I've never understood it. What does it mean?

Thad

I'm not intimately familiar with the specifics in this case, but starting with a server chip and "adding desktop processor attributes" would typically entail:

adding the inability to use ECC.
adding a reduction in cache.
adding a lack of fault tolerance or error checking capabilities.
adding the feature of being impossible to use with > 2 sockets.
adding a whizzy new marketing name.

And, the enthusiast desktop parts are often easy to overclock, while server parts assume you'll just buy a faster CPU instead of wasting time fiddling with something that may catch fire.

BTW, hey, I remember you from alt.movies.visual-effects "back in the day" before the death of Usenet. good to see you haven't fallen off the face of the planet. I'm not in the process of working on a compositing demo reel so I can try to jump from straight IT to visual effects in the near future. I blame this career change in part on all your interesting and informative posts getting stuck in my head. :)

Stable

[raddan (519638)]

As long as you have an ample supply of liquid nitrogen.

This looks bad next to a amd dual quad-core system

[Joe The Dragon (967727)]

single-slot graphics cards, FBDIMMS and you will need 4 of them to get the max system out of the memory system, SLI useing Nvidia nForce 100 chips over a pci-e x16 1.1 bus split to 2 x16 slots, dual eps power in, 3 chip sets chips that driver up cost and power use.

The dual amd system that this will be like this will use DESKTOP RAM, have 2 or more chipset choices. Also the amd setup lets you have 2 full Northbridge chipsets for even more i/o the nForce 680a uses this and nvidia will likey have a new chipset with pci-e 2.0. The old has a x16 x8 x8 x16 pci-e with a total of 56 PCI-E lanes.

The new amd chipet is also comeing and you may even see a board with 2 Northbridges = 82 pci-e lanes.

790FX

        * Codenamed RD790, final name revealed to be "AMD 790FX chipset"
        * Dual-socket (Quad FX, Dual Socket Direct Connect Architecture) or single AMD processor configuration
        * Maximum four physical PCI-E x16 slots and discrete PCI-E x4 slot , the chipset provides a total of 52 PCI-E lanes, with 41 lanes in Northbridge
        * HyperTransport 3.0 with support for HTX slots and PCI Express 2.0
        * ATI CrossFire X, see below
        * AutoXpress, see below
        * Extreme overclocking, reported to have achieved about 420 MHz bus for overclocking an Athlon 64 FX FX-62 processor, from originally 200 MHz.
        * Discrete chipset cache memory of at least 16 KB to reduce the latencies and increase the bandwidth
        * Supports Dual Gigabit Ethernet, and teaming option
        * Reference board codenamed "Wahoo" for dual-processor system reference design board with three physical PCI-E x16 slots, and "HammerHead" for single-socket system reference design board with four physical PCI-E x16 slots, also notable was the reference boards includes two ATA ports and only four SATA 3.0 Gbit/s ports (as being paired with SB600 southbridge), but the final product with SB700 or SB750 southbridge (see below) should support up to six SATA ports
        * Northbridge made on 65 nm process, manufactured by TSMC, and runs at 3 W when idle, and maximum 10 W under load, nominal 8 W power consumption, the northbridge was seen on reference design with single passive cooling heatsink only instead of connecting to heat pipes which are frequently used on current mainstream motherboard offers, the combination of 790FX northbridge with SB600 southbridge consumes normally less than 15 W
        * Enthusiast discrete multi-graphics segment

Even if the Intel system is faster the amd system with less costly MB and much cheaper ram will likely be a better buy.

Progress

[Duncan3 (10537)]

Another huge technology gain for virgins living in their parents basements worried about their small penis.

Next, from AMD...

[Junior J. Junior III (192702)]

The AMD Skullfucker-64 5300+ will 0wn this.

8GB RAM + SLI?

[TheLink (130905)]

Just curious would SLI video cards and popular games actually work well with 64 bit Windows?

Correct me if I'm wrong but if you're stuck with 32 bit windows there's no point having much more than 2GB RAM if you're doing SLI, given you have 4GB addressing space and the video cards would take a large chunk of that addressing space.

Re:But...

[sm62704 (957197)]

But can it run on Linux?

Dude, you can run linux on a wristwatch. The question is, can it run Vista?

From an old K5 diary: [kuro5hin.org]

At any rate, I tell the guy about my dead Celeron and how I want to upgrade the motherboard, and get some memory, and get a video card so I can plug it into the TV. He tries to sell me a supercomputer cluster, and I say no, I'm not much into computer gaming any more so a pretty low end one would do.

-mcgrew

Re:

[Constantine XVI (880691)]

Somehow, I'm pretty sure the NSA uses more than just "vanilla" x86/AMD64.

Re:

[mrbluze (1034940)]

Somehow, I'm pretty sure the NSA uses more than just "vanilla" x86/AMD64.

Yeah you're right. Just stirrin' ;)

Re:But...

[WhiteWolf666 (145211)]

I'm skeptical about that.

I'd be fairly certain that the NSA uses some kind of off-the-shelf processors, whether that be Power, Itanium, or X86.

What the NSA does different, most likely, is scale. You put 1,000 of these in a supercomputer? They'll put 100,000.

Chip fabs are expensive, as is chip design. There's no reason not to leave that to the experts (AMD/Intel). It's a commodity process, and they'll do it better than the government ever can.

Supercomputer design is something else. That's not commodity; and it's a simple scaling problem. More $$ = Bigger computer.

Why should they bother reinventing the wheel?

Re:

[geekoid (135745)]

This would be useless to intelligence. Try to use yours.

Re:Not the first one at all

[GreggBz (777373)]

So it's as fast as MS-Office. :=p