Intel 2004 CPU/Chipset Roadmap Update
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Kris Kubicki and Wesley Fink on January 21, 2004 1:29 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Chipsets
It was recently made public that Intel's upcoming chipsets - Grantsdale and Alderwood - would be called i915 and i925X respectively. We talked about those chipsets back at CES but what we didn't talk about were 915G, 915GV and 910GL. We originally thought 925X would launch only for Socket 775, and 915P for both. However, even though the roadmap is slightly vague it appears 915P will effectively replace 865PE; it will have the same performance of 875P with some extra features: PCI Express x1 and x16, Azalia Audio (Intel's AC'97 replacement), DDR2 and of course the new Southbridge which we will talk more about in a little bit.
Even though 915P will support 533MHz DDR2, we will most likely see DDR2 support showing up only on 925X motherboards. Most manufacturers we talked to during CES did not see enough differentiation between 865PE/875P, and this actually hurt sales in the long run. Even with 925X and 915P, we once again expect a PAT-like interface on 925X. Those in the industry say Intel has also made it a much more difficult enable "PAT" on Grantsdale. Other than "PAT", the only other real difference we can see is support for ECC memory on 925X. Most manufacturers we spoke with with planned to use current DDR on 915P boards, reserving DDR2 for 925X.
The new ICH6 southbridge will make its appearance with the 925/915 and makes some interesting promises. First, in any ICH6 denoted with a "/R" suffix, we will see 4 SATA interfaces whereas ICH5 only had two. As kind of a bonus, ICH6/W will provide integrated wireless. ASUS's P4P800S-E turned out to be a surprising success due to its on board wireless capabilities. Maybe Intel has learned a thing or two from its component manufacturers.
915G has all the features of 915P, but with integrated graphics. While we have no details of the graphics capabilities of the new 915G, it is reasonable to expect higher performance but nothing too impressive based on Intel's prior track record.. Intel anticipates this to be the corporate chipset of choice, and will follow up on the 915G with the 915GV and 915GL chipsets in Q3. 915GV and 915GL are basically just stripped down versions of 915G.
The roadmap coverage continues, we hope you enjoyed this one as well...
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Oxonium - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
#9, if you read the article it says that there WILL be a 533 MHz FSB Prescott and several other sites like Xbit have been saying for weeks that there will be a 2.8 GHz Prescott with 533 MHz FSB but with no HT support. In any case, the authors have fixed the table and it now shows a Prescott 2.8 GHz with 533 MHz FSB.I'm sitting pretty with my Athlon64 3200+. While there will likely be faster CPUs from both AMD and Intel this year, I don't really see a reason to upgrade from that chip for quite a while.
Icewind - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
To bad i've already decided on getting a Athlon 64 939 pin setup this summer. Sorry Intel, better luck next time.#7
I believe that they were talking in regards to the "C" model of the P4 which use the 800mhz FSB, not 533mhz which the've stop producing last I heard.
barbary - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
Could we have a updated roadmap for Xeons.I know were never happy are we.
:-)
Oxonium - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
Shouldn't one of the Pentium 4 2.8GHz processors in the first table be listed with a 533 MHz FSB? Right now all are listed with an 800 MHz FSB.MAME - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
#5: Yeah, I agree. $200 for a 2.8 says #1. Well $200 will get you an A64 3000+ that you can oc and upgrade (for a little while). Not only that, it totally dominates the p4 in everything except the encoding department, in which case it's pretty much even.Reflex - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
#1: Or, for less money, you can pick up an Athlon64. Once socket 939 comes out, thats the direction that seems most obvious to me. Should have a long upgrade path, and at least its a CPU designed for the future(64bit). Kinda sick of investing in 1985 technology on steroids...KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
NDA?Adul - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
when kris ;)KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
Got an Azalia audio follow up on the way....TrogdorJW - Wednesday, January 21, 2004 - link
Price/performance of the new Celerons will be interesting to see. I think the 256K of cache is still going to hurt it, but it might actually be able to pass up the Duron chips now. (I doubt it will be able to match the Athlon XP chips, though.) One thing to definitely look forward to is the likely HIGH overclockability of the 90 nm low-end Celerons. I wouldn't be surprised to see people take the 2.53 and 2.8 up to "FSB666" - which would clock them at 3.17 and 3.5 GHz - or maybe even higher. If they only cost around $100, we could be looking at a return to the "glory days" of the Celery! :)As for the Socket 478 ending at 3.4 GHz, I'm not too surprised. Or disappointed. Getting a good P4 right now is a viable option - you can pick up the 2.8 for under $200. I doubt that the minor speed increase to 3.4 GHz will be that noticeable for most applications. Graphics cards are much more important for gaining performance in any games at this point, especially at reasonable resolutions. Sure, you can't upgrade the system that much further, but a 2.8 GHz machine should last at least a couple years from now.