The Intel Developer Forum last week had its usual share ofhigh-profile announcements. But the one which particularly grabbed my attentionamongst the easily anticipated news of 45nm progress and Penryn processors skyrocketing to 5.65GHz went by the sinister name of Skulltrail.

You probably hadn't heard of this two weeks ago, and youstill might not know what I'm talking about just yet. If you don't, this is thecodename of Intel's forthcoming dual-socket platform for ultra high-endenthusiasts. It has now been demonstrated in full operation using a PC port of the Xbox360 game Lost Planet.

Following the trail

So whose skulls are leaving a trail? Well, if I feltperverse I would say it was obvious that these are the heads of AMD executives,scalped and skinned. AMD was supposed to be the first to provide eightprocessing cores for the enthusiast, when its Quad FX platform is upgraded withtwin quad-core Phenom FX processors, replacing the current Athlon FX 70 series.But this is still nowhere to be seen, and now Intel has got there first.

AMD was also supposed to be harnessing the synergy of gamesdesigned for triple-core consoles.But Lost Planet is such an Xbox360 game, and Intel has now shown it getting atleast some benefit from eight processing cores - oh, and Quad SLI as well. Sothere's a fair chance that even if it does well on triple-core, quad-core willstill be better. With four Nvidia graphics cards in tow.

Fortunately, I'm not really that perverse, even if I amrepresented by a mysterious green silhouette and go by an infantile 'l33tsp34k' pseudonym. Skulltrail certainly looks like Intel thumbing its nose atAMD, kicking a man when he's down - something we all frown upon publicly butwholeheartedly enjoy when nobody's watching.

Taking an FB-DIMMview

But it's in no way obvious Skulltrail will be any moresuccessful than Quad FX, which has been about as well received as Robert Mugabeat a Royal wedding party. For a start, current versions are using FB-DIMMs.These are the same high-end memory modules required by Xeon workstations andservers, and the subject of some controversy as they eat Watts for breakfast compared to conventional DDR2.

FB-DIMMs are also a little more expensive than regular DDR2DIMMs, and you can't get overclockable enthusiast versions of them yet either.So whilst you can easily buy DDR2 rated at 1,066MHz, the top FB-DIMMs stickwith the JEDEC standard of 800MHz, and even these are hard topurchase. With desktop DDR3 now starting to become available, FB-DIMMs usingDDR3 are nowhere to be seen, either.

Who needs eightcores?

Then there's the more glaring question over precisely howuseful eight cores will be for a desktop user - even a high-end enthusiast.Despite dual-core having been the norm for a couple of years now, and quad-corereadily available for nine months, most applications are still resolutelysingle threaded.

Even games get scant benefit so far. Intel's Lost Planetdemo showed eight cores in operation, but running at under 30 per centutilisation apiece. So you wouldn't even be using three cores at 100 per cent.I can hear AMD breathing a big sigh of relief already.

Maybe Skulltrail isn't so scary after all, then. It'scertainly more of a demonstration of what is technologically possible thananything you're really going to need for some years to come. But there's needand there's want, and I know Skulltrail will be hard to resist, even if youwon't probably get the full benefit of its parallel processing and graphicsuntil long after the hardware itself is obsolete.