X-bit labs

Kinky Luxury: Intel Skulltrail Platform Review (page 8)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 02/22/2008 | 05:29 PM ]

Image Editing and Non-Linear Video Editing

Although the latest Adobe Photoshop version is optimized for SMP systems, it is actually true not for all operations and filters. Therefore, the results of this test do not really reveal the advantages of 8-core Skulltrail platform over the same quad-core one. So, the winner here is a simple single-socket system with high-performance DDR3 SDRAM.

The results of popular video and non-linear editing applications are also not in Skulltrail’s favor. These applications also know to effectively distribute the workload in multi-processor systems, however our system with a single Core 2 Extreme QX9770 is again faster than Skulltrail. I once again convince myself that FB-DIMM should stay as far away from desktop systems as possible. Otherwise, it threatens to become an inevitable bottleneck limiting the performance in numerous resource-hungry applications.

Final Rendering

Final 3D rendering tasks are traditionally demonstrating almost linear performance scalability from the number of computational cores in the system. No wonder that Skulltrail platform is beyond any possible competition here. The only problem is that rendering is not the main type of applications that would be run on Skulltrail, because gaming enthusiasts are hardly interested in it and professionals dealing with 3D suites would normally have a workstation at their disposal.