If you hang around these parts, you've been hearing that codename bandied about for the better part of a year now. Not only does it have the distinction of being, quite probably, the single coolest codename known to all of geekdom, but it's also attached to the sort of hardware required to back up the copious bravado it implies. You see, Skulltrail is a high-end desktop PC platform based on workstation-class chips taken from Intel's Xeon parts shelf. We're talking about some wicked numbers here, such as dual sockets, eight cores, four graphics card slots, and dual 1600MHz front-side buses with a total of 25.6GB/s of bandwidth.
Reviews from around the web: Tech Report, PCPerspective, ExtremeTech.
Put in simple terms, Skulltrail is a dream platform for enthusiasts, however as you will read in the above articles, this can sometimes better serve as bragging rights than actual performance superiority. Intel's Skulltrail is by heaps and bounds more exciting technology than the AMD Spider platform, but it is also far more costly and that will reduce its appeal to a very limited audience.