Leaked - Skulltrail 8-core Penryn benchmarks at IDF

All sorts of things have been mysteriously falling in to my lap lately and IDF has been no different.  Someone who does not work for ZDNet or CNET Networks handed me a sheet of paper with some very interesting benchmarks for the newest "Skulltrail" enthusiast game/workstation.  Since I signed no NDAs and never agreed to one verbally, I'm free to disclose the leaked performance numbers.

The Skulltrail is a computer based on a dual-socket motherboard that's probably a derivative of "Stoakley" which supports FSB1600 with Fully Buffered DDR2-800 DIMMS and two quad-core Penryn 45nm CPUs.  The system shown below is based on two "pre-production" 3.4 GHz quad-core Penryn processors with two 2 GB DDR2-800 CL5 FBDIMMs.  It also has two NVIDIA 8800GTX graphics cards in SLI configuration but the benchmarks in question weren't graphics intensive so they merely showcase the capability of the CPU.

I took a high-resolution photo of the benchmark results below [Update 1:30PM - converted to text below]

Test system Configuration	System A	System B
PROCESSOR	2x Pre-production 45nm Hi-k Intel quad core processors (12MB cache, 3.40Ghz, 1600MHz FSB)	Pro-production 45nmmi High-K quad core processor (12MB cache, 3.00GHz. 1333Mhz FSB)
MOTHERBOARD	Skulltrail dual socket motherboard	Pre-production Intel X38 - motherboard
BIOS	Pre-Production Engineering Bios	Pre-Production Engineering Bios
GRAPHICS CARD	2 x NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTx	1 x NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX
GRAPHICS DRIVER	NVIDIA pre-production driver	NVIDIA ForceWare Release 162.22
MEMORY	2x2GB Pre-production Micron DRD2-800 CL5 FBDIMMs	2x1GB Corsair CM3X 1024-1333C9DHX
HARD DRIVE	Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10 7200RPM	Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10 7200RPM
OPERATING SYSTEM	Vista x86 32-bit Ultimate	Vista x86 32-bit Ultimate
Benchmark or software application
3DMark*06 V1.1.0 Pro - CPU (score)	6359	4569
3DMark*06 V1.1.0 Pro - Overall (score)	17006	11899
Cinebench* R10 Beta (CPU Benchmark)	21521	11810
TMPG Inc. * TMPGEnc 4.0 Express rev 4.3.3.9999 Beta (seconds)	53	72

The 3DMark *06 V1.1.0 Pro CPU scores didn't seem to reflect a heavily threaded benchmark so it didn't really show much of a difference.  I'm not sure what to make of the TMPGEnc 4.0 encoding numbers other than the fact that it appears to not scale too well beyond 4 cores.  TMPGEnc appears to be one of the latest applications that added SSE4 support for vastly improved video encoding.

I was in the demo booth for the SSE4 Penryn demos and Adobe Premier was also one of the applications being showcased with SSE4 support and it seemed to scale perfectly up to 4 threads but it wasn't demoed on Skulltrail which as 8 cores.  I'm not sure how it compares to a pre-SSE4 processor but a beta version of DiVX was showing more than a doubling in performance per core at the same clock frequency compared with the existing Core 2 Duo 65nm processors.