Intel intros top-gun gaming PC platform

By Tony Smith in Beijing • Get more from this author

17th April 2007 06:24 GMT

IDF Chip colossus Intel looks set to create a Centrino-like platform for desktop gaming later this year when it brings 'Skulltrail' - a high-end gaming PC design - to market.

Skulltrail is based around two of Intel's four-core Core 2 Extreme processor and connects them to up to four PCI Express graphics cards, some used for physics processing, presumably, rather than pumping pixels.

Intel didn't provide any other details, but it did say the system can "take advantage of the Core microarchitecture's headroom and scaling" - it's upgradeable, in other words, no doubt to the upcoming 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850 Intel has yet to formally announce

It has announced the X38 'Bearlake'-class chipset, due to ship later this quarter. Skulltrail itself won't appear until H2 2007, but it's almost certainly based on the X38.

Will Skulltrail become Intel's 'gametrino'? Intel's media centre platform, Viiv, certainly hasn't been the success that Centrino was, but with arch-rival AMD pitching its Quad FX package at consumers via system builders, Intel no doubt feels it needs to do the same.