X-bit labs

Intel Developer Forum: Yorkfield and Skulltrail Performance Preview (page 2)

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

[ 09/20/2007 | 10:42 AM ]

On Tuesday Pat Gelsinger demonstrated another similar Skulltrail system at his keynote presentation. Although that one ran on a non-overclocked processor working at 3.0GHz speed and utilized water-cooling system.

Intell Skulltrail at 3.0GHz default speed

And to prove that this system boasts remarkable frequency potential and is very promising overall, they overclocked it to 4.0GHz by just raising the clock multiplier a little. Yeah, I guess it would hardly make sense to hope that Intel’s workstation mainboard could allow raising the FSB frequency :)

I have to stress that Intel didn’t really feel like sharing any indepth performance data for this system as well as for single Yorkfield processors with us. Maximum what we managed to get were the results of a few benchmarks where Skulltrail running at default working frequency was compared against single Yorkfield processor. The test configurations of these systems were as follows:

Skulltrail system:

• 2 x pre-production 45nm Hi-k Intel quad-core Harpertown processors (3.4GHz, 1600MHz FSB, 12MB cache);
• Skulltrail dual-socket mainboard
• 2 Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards in SLI mode;
• 2x2GB DDR2-800 CL5 FB DIMM modules from Micron;
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB HDD.

Single-Yorkfield system:

• Pre-production 45nm Hi-k Intel quad-core Yorkfield processor (3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB cache);
• Intel X38 based mainboard
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card;
• 2x1GB Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX DIMM modules;
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB HDD.

Skulltrail	Single-Yorkfield
CINEBENCH R10 Beta CPU Benchmark
3DMark06 V1.1.0 Pro

The results of these tests showed excellent system scalability improving even better with the increase of the number of CPUs from one to two. However, we are talking only about the tests optimized for multithreaded workload and not loading the memory subsystem too heavily. And the memory subsystem based on DDR2-800 FB-DIMM is a true weak spot of Skulltrail platform. So, let’s not draw any final conclusions at this time.