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LOSTCIRCUITS
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| Intel's SkullTrail Extreme Platform Playground of the Titans | |
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(Author: Michael Schuette, February 10, 2008) |
Overclocking
One of the differences between the V8 and the SkullTrail platform is that the latter has overclocking potential, at least, a demo system was shown by Intel running at 4 GHz - air cooled. The system at hand was quite reluctant to run at any bus speed above 400 MHz. At 415 MHz the setup still POSTed and made it through the Vista spashscreen but locked up every time just before the log-in. Keep in mind that what we have is still a "release candidate" with a beta BIOS, so things may change in the production version and quite frankly, there is so much power already there that additional overclocking becomes somewhat academic.
Final Thoughts
It has been somewhat surprising to see Intel’s D5400XS or SkullTrail Extreme motherboard since there is hardly any precedent for this type of board, call it chimera or monstrosity or simply the best thing since sliced cheese. Only you wouldn’t run benchmarks on a piece of sliced cheese even though it could be a matter of taste, too. The idiosyncrasies of the SkullTrail platform have widely been explained by the – now discontinued – Quad FX platform, just build something that goes beyond the boundaries of anything previously known to the gaming world. Or server world, whichever is more important. A follow-up on an ill-fated platform, however, doesn’t do the SkullTrail justice, neither can it be described as a science project. We prefer looking at it as a concept that somebody came up with - just because he could and because it was fun. And all of a sudden, there is a product release on the horizon. Needless to say that this technology showcase is something that most of our readers will never lay their hands on, the price is going to be somewhat prohibitive for wide-spread acceptance.
This said, the SkullTrail is a fascinating system, that requires complete rethinking of what one can do with a personal computer and also of how to approach the task at hand since, for the first time in a decade, the I/O system is becoming a major bottleneck even in rather complex media encoding / decoding situations, something that we have not witnessed in years. At least not to a degree where a single benchmark showed a 50% performance difference between a single vs. a dual drive configuration (DVD-Shrink). And that was using a fast SATA-3.0 gbps drive with a 16 MB cache.
Amazing…
We are no friends of the FBDIMM concept either but in the type of environment represented by the SkullTrail platform, it makes perfect sense to have the capabilities of independent read and write buses on two separate branches to avoid stalling of data loads by an update of system memory content necessitated by eight cores fighting over cache coherency. Even with a snoop filter in place, this type of scenario will not be the exception. This is especially true in the case of concurrent multithreaded applications that are spanning across the two physical processors and, therefore, cannot be coordinated via cross-talk between the individual dies or cores thereon. Suffice it to say that this type of application will push the envelope of current memory architectures as we know them but as of now, there are preciously few of these scenarios out there, that would force platform designers to look for alternative solutions.
If you build it, they will come...
Every increment in hardware capabilities since the inception of computers has spawned a flurry of software applications trying to take advantage of the latest achievements. However, with increasing levels of parallelism it is also getting increasingly more difficult to tune the software to the new beat and the abysmal single-mindedness not only of the story line but also of the engines in the current game landscape are very symptomatic for this lack of adaptation to the new hardware. Aside from the cache coherency issues that are plaguing every multithreaded application, there are issues with thread relinquishing and prioritizing that are adding new levels of complexity “on the go”. However, it would be very myopic to use these arguments against extended SMP, truth is that it only requires a single vendor creating an application that will take advantage of the parallelism and that vendor will rule. It is just becoming more difficult for the smaller developers to keep up with the big guys. Until somebody smart with a new idea comes along...
So how is the SkullTrail system? In a nutshell, it is far and away the most powerful system we have ever laid hands on. It is one of these systems that one turns on just to look at the task manager and watch the eight cores in action ... and smile! At this point the SkullTrail platform has not been released yet and thus it still needs to be considered a concept rather than a product. However, this is going to change in the coming weeks since the commercial relase is imminent. And it will rule, no doubt about it.
Is SkullTrail going to be the all-ecompassing solution for everybody looking into high-end computing? Most likely not. In order to take full advantage of the hardware, the minimum software platform necessary is a 64-bit OS. However, even though most applications are running in a WoW environment, there are too many programs out there, especially in the professional space targeted by this setup, that are using some legacy code that is not supported in a 64-bit OS. Then again, if you build it, they will come and, moreover, this is also where virtualization is becoming more and more important by consolidating "incompatible" software on the same platform.
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