Intel announces DDR333 Chipsets: 3-way 845PE shootout

Hyper-Threading: Now Fully Supported

With the announcement of these new chipsets Intel is also announcing that all 533MHz FSB chipsets made by Intel officially support Hyper-Threading; the only exception being the A-stepping of the 845G chipset. Unfortunately Intel didn't provide us with a quick method of finding out what boards used the 845G A-stepping, meaning that you'll have to find out directly from your motherboard manufacturer.

This label appeared on ASUS' PE board; we'd expect similar labels from other manufacturers denoting HT support.

The burden will actually fall on the motherboard manufacturer to enable Hyper-Threading mostly through the use of the proper hardware and BIOS support. We'd expect most manufacturers to release Hyper-Threading enabled BIOSes in the very near future in order to preempt the release of the first HT enabled CPU.

Now that you know what platforms support the technology, where are the CPUs? Intel has announced that the first HT enabled Pentium 4 would be the 3.06GHz part to be released before the end of the year, but what about current CPUs? Unfortunately, although the technology is physically on today's Pentium 4's it is not in its final silicon form and isn't enabled on the chips themselves. Even if you could enable it, the performance may not be up to par with the final revision of the HT architecture. So it won't be until the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 is released that you'll be able to take advantage of Hyper-Threading.

We're still waiting to hear SiS and VIA's official line on Hyper-Threading support in their P4 chipsets.