Intel Skulltrail Benchmark and Analysis

Tom's Hardware has a detailed benchmark and analysis of Intel's new Skulltrail offering, taking a look at 8 vs 4 cores. The comparison uses games, A/V applications, office applications, and 3D rendering tools to help demonstrate benchmarks. "We were disappointed by the Skulltrail platform. Although we have tested and reviewed numerous Intel products, we have never had such a half-baked system such as this in our labs. If this sounds harsh, bear in mind that all we have to base this conclusion on is the Skulltrail system itself in its current state, which Intel provided as an official review platform. We do not know whether Intel plans to revise and improve the platform before the final versions ship to retail."

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[deander2]

what?!? an 8-core machine doesn't run single-threaded benchmarks any faster than a 1 core? that's crazy! what a revolution! what's next? we'll discover that 9 women can't create a baby in one month?!?

shocked, i tell you! shocked!

I know you're trying to be funny...

[ruiner13]

..but I think the article was saying that on single threaded apps, instead of the benchmarks being identical for the same processor in a single socket vs dual socket configuration, the dual socket one was slower. If you bothered to read the article, on multi-threaded applications there were indeed speed increases (40-50%, nowhere near the 80-90% gains you'd expect). They weren't expecting the single threaded performance to suffer.

My guess is that the memory controller is now becoming the bottleneck, since it has two sockets to feed instead of just one. In this application, the AMD chips with integrated memory controllers would seem to have an advantage (for now).