Intel Chipsets
With Prescott just around the corner, only two days away at the time of writing, and the upcoming socket change to LGA775 (Socket T) definitely happening in 2004, new chipsets have once again come into focus.Grantsdale is perhaps the most famous chipset that people have heard about, but it's not the better performing of the two that will be released in April, to mark the switch to LGA775 and PCI Express supporting motherboards.
The desktop version of Grantsdale is i915P and will be accompanied by i915G/i915GV and i910GL, desktop and low-cost desktop versions with Intel's 3rd generation integrated graphics solution. The graphics core is said to support quad displays, driving two natively and (hopefully) seamless support for all other standard dual display adaptors, for four in total. Here's hoping performance is as Extreme as the marketing name implies, it can't get much worse.
Alderwood (i925X) is the high performance version of Grantsdale, like Canterwood is to Springdale currently. Featuring PAT technology like current bridges, along with support for ECC and Registered DRAMs, it'll be the chipset of choice for the high performance brigade. Current word is a 5% general performance improvement, the roadmap stops short of speculating explicitly.
Both bridges have support for PCI Express, both as a conduit for graphics cards and as a peripheral expansion bus via new southbridge chips. PCI Express 16x is present in the northbridge chips for graphics, the new ICH6 southbridge adding a 1x peripheral bus.
Alderwood supports only 800MHz front side bus processors and DDR-II memory at 400MHz or 533MHz frequencies. It's unknown if Alderwood will support present DDR in board designs from brave manufacturers, but expect Intel to force things to DDR-II only, dragging early adopters kicking and screaming to the new memory standard, as usual.
Grantsdale will support both DDR and DDR-II, 800MHz and 533MHz processors and will only drive LGA755 sockets, meaning Prescott and LGA755 versions of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chips, of which a 3.4GHz version will appear first.
The ICH6 bridge supports PCI Express 1x, 6 full SATA ports (RAID supported on the /R bridge) and also a wireless AP solution in a /W version of the bridge, similar to what ASUS ships with WiFi equipped motherboards, but on the southbridge obviously.
Finally, mPGA478 support will make it into i910GL for use as a mobile chipset solution, along with ICH6. It's the only other non-LGA775 socket that a i9xx bridge will support, there's no chance of Socket 478 support for Northwood processors.
While the chipsets launch just after Q1 2004 finishes, they're close enough and relevant enough to upcoming processor launches to warrant a mention in this Q1-focussed article.
Summary
Nothing too exciting when you've taken in the information above and you understand Intel's platform plans and the inevitable socket change. PCI Express is the excuse for the chipset changes, Intel keen to integrate quickly as AMD's platform partners 'flounder' with a discrete chip before integrating into a native bridge themselves.The socket change seems semi-necessary from an electrical and packaging point of view, they'll argue that they'll get it out of the way sooner rather than later and it's better to pair it with a CPU architecture and memory type switch, no matter how forced it seems.
Whatever the reasons, there's a socket change for Pentium 4 in April, get ready if you're looking towards an upgrade in that time frame, or indeed at any time this year.
