I'm sure anyone and everyone who takes up technology as a hobby or profession (usually both most of the time) already knows about "Skulltrail's" recent appearance at this year's GDC, but to the average Joe gamer, they might not have picked up on this behemoth of a monster. Skulltrail, or the "Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform", is the equivalent of sticking a George Foreman grill, a liter of Mountain Dew, and Orange Glo into your PC. In less extreme words, this mofo supports 2 quad core processors and up to 4 video cards using either SLi or Crossfire setup. That's the kind of technology that should belong in Terminator 2.

Now, don't get me wrong, as somewhat of a techophile I would love to even just be in the same room with that kind of setup, but the collective gamer in me (the other half) would have to question if it's even a viable choice as a gaming platform. Yeah, even having the copious amount of money to even afford half of what's required to run this kind of setup seems far fetched, but what about the hardware itself? Intel seem's to be pushing this monster not just for PC enthusiast's but for the "extreme" gamer as well but c'mon guys, really? I'm still having trouble running 64-bit applications on stuff that should have been addressed a long time ago, and they're already throwing 8 cores at us? Last I checked, very few games use even 4, most only 2. And even the thought of running 4 8800 GTX's or 3870's is just crazy talk in itself (although I'm quite sure some people have already gone with the 3 card route by now).

From what I've experienced and seen, gaming itself is slowly falling further behind the PC technology that is somehow being developed to run the newest and latest games with maximum potential. 64-bit apps and games never really took off, dual core had a few hiccups, but seemed to be allowing enough games to finally take advantage of using 2 cores (either by patch or built in), then....well nothing really came out for four cores except a couple games like Crysis and UT, and now 8 cores are supposed to be the supreme end all for the next year or so? With most games coming out for console's or being ported to the PC nowaday's, I wonder if we have a dev team that would even work on utilizing that kind of raw power. Unless these 8 cores can scale the work like SLi or Crossfire technology, I wouldn't expect "extreme" performance even from this hardcore setup to be a dream come true.