Intel to gamers: Eight is enough

Intel's taking a cue from Advanced Micro Devices and Apple with a gaming platform scheduled for later this year.

Skulltrail (catchy code name, there) will give gamers with cash to burn the opportunity to plug two quad-core desktop chips into a platform that also comes with four PCI Express slots for graphics cards. It's scheduled to arrive later this year, said Intel Digital Home Group chief Eric Kim, and it's likely to cost a bundle.

If that idea sounds familiar, it's because AMD trotted out a similar product last year for dual-core processors called 4x4. And Apple's Mac Pro is shipping with two quad-core processors. Intel will let the rest of its customers get on board with eight cores later this year, even though gaming software companies are just getting around to figuring out what to do with more than two cores, let alone eight.