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David Field

Skulltrail is pointless, stupid and unnecessary

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By David Field
12:45 Apr 2, 2008

Here in the Atomic Offices, it’s unlikely that any given workday will end without Josh and myself having an argument.

They all start off innocently enough. The most recent example was this morning, when a new HD3850 arrived on my desk. It’s from Sapphire, and even though it’s new and shiny and powerful it runs on an old, dilapidated AGP bus.

To me (and me! –ed), it’s an example of brilliant engineering that will provide a new lease of life for old computers. To Josh, it’s dead technology that somethings a whatever. I wasn’t paying that much attention to what he was saying.

And that’s why our arguments escalate from friendly banter to table beating crescendos that attract the attention of the boys on the sports desk.

The most reliable aspect of our arguments is that they all end with a pause, followed by a calm “So where did you end up at the end of the V Festival? I swear I saw you crowd surfing during the Pumpkins and being pulled out by security”, or something similar.

These pointless arguments don’t usually linger around the offices for more than a few minutes, because we know that they are pointless. And fun. And they let us air our opinions and explore why we both hold them. But there’s one unusual topic that’s been raised several times in the last few weeks.

It’s Skulltrail. It’s got eight Xeon cores across two processors on a single board that supports both ATI’s Crossfire and Nvidia’s triple SLI and more. But I can quickly summarise all the technical specifications for you in five words. It’s pointless, stupid and unnecessary.

This is because it’s an 8-core workstation board that’s been pruned back and tarted up to appeal to gamers. And in the financially irresponsible process of doing this, the entire point of having the power of an 8-core workstation has been lost.

Let’s start with the obvious. The vast majority of games are still coded in The Land of 32 Bit. This limits the system to 3-point-insignifigant gigabytes of RAM, which you’ll have to divvy up between the two workstation strength Xeons that you’ve just blown several thousand dollars on. Intel knows this, and has endowed Skulltrail with 4 DIMM sockets; the standard number that gamers are used to seeing.

So even if you install a 64-bit OS, you’re missing out on the sixteen (16) DIMMS that you see on almost every workstation board. There’s no onboard SAS, no remote system management, no infiniband network link. And, of course, you’ll have an uphill battle trying to get the thing inside a case.

Way back in the day, my rig was built of two Durons on a server board working in SMP (symmetric Multi Processing, or the way you got dual core before it existed on a single processor). It was fantastic to be able to host a dedicated server, set the process’ affinity to one processor, launch the game again, set its affinity to the other processor, and watch as people looked at my machine mystified as to how it could run both client and server instances of the notoriously intensive Battlefield 1942. You see, although I do love getting silly with excessive power, I prefer when I can confidently use it all.

This was a while ago though. Now that we have more capable processors that contain multiple cores, the need (and sane people’s desire) to hijack server gear for gaming purposes has disappeared. Even If I was playing a game, while hosting its dedicated server, and rendering a 3D animation, and hashing a directory (why not), and batch converting WAVs to OGG (I’ve got a barrel to scrape here), I doubt I could use Skulltrail’s 8 cores to their full potential for anything productive.

Unless, of course, I told the idle cores to busy themselves crunching numbers for SETI -- the computational equivalent of masturbation.

Skulltrail is silly because it brings server power to the people who can’t use it. It’s also a case of bad timing. Right now the computer industry should not be racing to give us more power. It should be trying to strike a balance between power, code efficiency of the applications that we use and trying to lead a mass exodus out of The Land of 32 Bit. And, most importantly, write software that’s properly multi-threaded.

Skulltrail is merely Intel’s new E-wang, which some people may mistakenly want as their own E-wang – provided they can stomach the expense and don’t realise that the utter impracticality of the thing makes it pointless, stupid and unnecessary.

Of course, Josh won’t agree with me. But that’s fine, because this morning I discovered I could transform him into a quivering, emotionally distraught husk of a man by rubbing my new AGP HD3850 on his head.

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Issue: 133 | February, 2012

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