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Intel takes wraps off high-performance Skulltrail platform

Intel released its enthusiast/workstation hybrid platform today, codenamed …

Intel's next-generation high-performance Skulltrail platform arrived today, ending months of speculation on what its features, performance, and capabilities would be. Intel was definitely arming for bear when it created Skulltrail—the dual-socket LGA771 D5400XS is built around Intel's workstation-class 5400 MCH northbridge and 6321ESB ICH southbridge, carries four PCIe 1.1 x16 slots, four 240-pin FB-DIMM slots (maximum of 16GB of memory installed), integrated eight-channel audio with Dolby Home Theater capability, and support for both ATI and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations.

The D5400XS also offers an impressive (if not earth-shattering) amount of connectivity options. The board supports up to 10 USB 2.0 headers, two FireWire (presumably IEEE 1394a) ports, six SATA-II drives, two eSATA ports, a single ATA port, and one gigE connector. The only missing feature that might have been nice on Skulltrail, given its workstation orientation, is a second Ethernet port. Then again, if you can afford a Skulltrail-based system, you can afford an extra gigabit Ethernet card, so it's probably not an issue.

As previously noted, the D5400XS supports both SLI and Crossfire—but not entirely equally. NVIDIA has historically been very protective of its SLI capability; Intel may have licensed the right to use the technology, but NVIDIA insisted on introducing its own bridge chips into the motherboard. Both pairs of PCIe slots on the board connect to an nForce 100 bridge chip, which then links back to the 5400 MCH. Because the nForce 100 chip is only PCIe 1.1 compatible, however, newer PCIe 2.0 cards won't be able to take full advantage of their own bandwidth capabilities.

This bandwidth limitation might not be much of an issue—we've yet to see compelling evidence that PCIe 2.0 provides a notable performance increase above PCIe 1.1—but other NVIDIA-imposed limitations on Intel's SLI support further complicate the issue. According to NVIDIA, three and four-way SLI setups will never be supported on the D5400XS due to a two-card limitation on the 5400 MCH. Tech Report contacted Intel for confirmation of this and was told that the 5400 MCH supports up to four video cards just fine, but that it was NVIDIA's responsibility to build the proper drivers and validate the solution. NVIDIA appears to have no plans to support more than two physical cards in SLI on Skulltrail—at least not for now.

If that's true, it seems quite shortsighted. ATI's recent resurgence into the market has the potential to put pressure on NVIDIA at multiple price points—and the Skulltrail platform isn't exactly aimed at buyers on a budget. It wouldn't surprise me at all if ATI has already given Intel a ring and explained how they'd just love to support a four-card/eight-GPU CrossfireX configuration on Skulltrail. Custom testbed demonstration, anyone?

Skulltrail's performance is something of a mixed bag. There's no reason to favor the new platform over a "standard" single-socket QX9770 build—if anything, the desktop-based platforms tend to be a bit faster than Skulltrail thanks to their use of DDR2/DDR3 memory instead of FB-DIMMs. Professional workstation performance is a bit different—there are certain applications that show a significant performance boost thanks to Skulltrail's eight cores—but such gains are even more conditional than the current performance boost one sees moving from two cores to four.

Skulltrail's value proposition is similarly dicey. On the one hand, the platform is technologically impressive, and squeezes more performance into a lower price point than we've previously seen, but the performance boost from eight cores over four cores is almost never worth the price jump. It's all well and good to claim that the platform is future-proofed for the "games and applications of tomorrow," but history tells us otherwise. Given the state of current dual-core/quad-core support, it'll be years until quad-core multithreading is truly widespread, to say nothing of octal-core. Granted, Skulltrail may be able to take advantage of certain emerging trends, but the system will no longer be high-end by the time software is widely available to make full use of its capabilities.

Skulltrail may make sense if you're a trust-fund baby or a professional working in an area where time is so valuable that it actually makes sense to invest in a workstation this expensive. For everyone else, it's overkill, and extremely expensive overkill at that. If you want bragging rights, just buy a QX9770. Your friends will still be jealous, your wallet will thank you, and your wife won't beat the snot out of you with the phone book when you get home.

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