With AMD’s upcomming ‘Istanbul’ CPU’s , Intel has remained quiet in the background. That was until Computex – multi CPU computing just got a whole lot more interesting; enter Skulltrail 2.

Although still in the rumor stages, one can only imagine the capabilities this latest Skulltrail can provide. With support for the planned Nehalem-EX ‘Octo-Core’ Processor , that would give the end user 16 ‘physical’ cores with 32-threads at their disposal. These monster CPU’s feature a quad-memory controller – using DDR3-1333, the system would be pumping out 85.3 GB/s of bandwidth but an upgrade to DDR3-1600 and a user would theoretically surpass 102.4GB/s! A truly astonishing and history making number.
 

In the realm of multi-threaded applications this is a bold move on Intel’s behalf.

Coupling two Nehalem-EX CPU’s would allow for a total L3 Cache of 48MB, which combined with eight channels of DDR3 would make for one frightning system. Support is on board as well for 4X PCI-e Slots giving the potential for us to have Quad-SLI or 4 Way Crossfire. All this, in a Desktop board.

Although no confirmation exists as of yet to the viability of said platform, we can only hope that Intel is willing to follow through with this latest rumor.

In the ever changing proverbial cold war between Intel and AMD, it looks like the comming summer will have things heating up in more ways then one.