Intel 3.4GHz Skulltrail And QX9650 Preview
Intel was kind enough to let a few members of the press get some time in with their Skulltrail platform, featuring a pair of quad-core Yorkfield processors at 3.4GHz on a Seabird chipset-based motherboard. HotHardware also have a glimpse of the new QX9650 processor for the desktop:
As you can see, the Skulltrail machine is much more powerful than the QX9650, thanks to its SLI graphics, higher clocked processors (3.4GHz vs. 3.0GHz), memory, and eight execution cores.
Skulltrail will come at a cost, however. Because it’s based on a server platform, it requires FBDIMMs and its motherboard will be much more expensive than typical enthusiast class mobos. An exact price wasn’t discussed, but if you think of it as a high-end Intel-built server mobo and account for the additional NVIDIA SLI switches that enable SLI, you can get an idea as to how much just the mobo is going to cost. Think somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 - $600.
On the mobile side, we witnessed a couple of encoding benchmarks that showed the benefits of SSE4. The notebook equipped with the 45nm processor finished the tests significantly faster than the existing Core 2 Duo T7800.
Source: Techamok