Intel told us that they won't do a reference motherboard for Nehalem dual socket, super desktop machine but there is still hope that partners will do it. Intel has told us that partners can do it, and it will be up to Asus, MSI and Gigabyte to manufacture one.

We are not sure if top three manufacturer are already working on new Skulltrail board based on Nehalem EP dual CPU platform, but this might be the only hope in survival of Skulltrail as a concept, sspecially in 2009. Super expensive computers might have a tough time to sell in a time of economic hardship, but the chaps who can buy Skulltrail can still buy Skulltrail II. However, it would just cost Intel too much money to sell only a few tens of thousands of units.

An even bigger is the lack of performance increases in a normal desktop environment with so many cores, as it’s very hard to put even single Nehalem to good use, not to mention two of them.

Still, niche markets like workstation and video editing might benefit from this platform, but they will be free to buy Nehalem-EP as of end of this month.