During my tour of duty at GDC, I've stopped today to see my friends at Intel. Dan Snyder, George Alfs and of course Sr. performance analyst François Piednoël (pictured) were all at the booth to show off Skulltrail, Intel's fastest platform with two 8-cores processors and targeted for the "enthusiasts" community.

"About a year and a half ago, I met with you with your camera, and we were showing an 8 cores machine running POVray, which was kind of a workstation board [...] What we did... We decided to do a platform based on the feedback and that's Skulltrail", said François Piednoël.

During our conversation, Piednoël shrugged off the idea that Skulltrail is a workstation platform: it does not have the same reliability than a workstation and supports SLI and Crossfire, which is not a workstation feature.

"Don't go and overclock things and touch the parameters of the machine and expect the reliability of a workstation. It's not going to happen. Those knobs are open... but we don't guarantee things when you get there... it's not a workstation just because of this... If you want to do workstation work you will plug a more robust, more OpenGL like graphic susbsystem.

Voltage is also another key difference between Skulltrail and a workstation platform.

"When you want to be able to overclock, we had to redesign the entire voltage regulator array. Right now you have 3 stages of voltage regulators on those [Skulltrail] boards. Workstations don't do this. They go for extremely sharp voltage regulation, no variation. Will Skulltrail you can go up to 1.9 volts. Actually it's a number that can damage your processor".

According to Piednoël, Skulltrail is actually a very good validation vehicle to use if someone wants to program for the future computers that Intel is going to release this year and next. Regarding power consumption, well it was not Intel's priority.. at all!

"Skulltrail is like a Ferrari. If you can't afford the gas. Don't buy it! ... Power [consumption] is not something that we considered when we designed Skulltrail... If you can produce a movie faster, you can turn off your computer earlier".

We redesigned the entire voltage regulator, 3 stage voltage regulators,array we open the knobs like any high end enthusiast platform t started - right now 3 stage regulator,