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.