IBM Releases a Chip, Intel a Chipset
This week IBM released a chip, Intel a chipset.
Intel won’t launch the Bearlake 3 Series chipset family until Computex in June. Nevertheless motherboards are shipping.
Intel has imparted technical details about the chipsets to the press and taken the wraps off an “NDA on P35 chipset and Intel’s Core 2 Duo E6850″ (INQUIRER).
The 3 Series chipsets consist of a traditional Intel “2-chip core logic” (p. 2).
A traditional chipset such as the 3 Series entails a memory controller hub (MCH) and an I/O controller hub (ICH). Expect this to change in 2008 with Nehalem, which is more than just a microprocessor design but a new system architecture as well.
There have been a spate of announcements from memory manufacturers recently about DDR3. Clearly something was about to happen.
Memory is a bottleneck, and DDR3 has the potential of delivering greater bandwidth. The P35 and G33 chipsets support either DDR2 or DDR3. However, DDR3 is expected to be very expensive at first. Think of this as “the ‘early adopter’ tax” (p. 3).
A bigger reason than DDR3 for upgrading to a Bearlake board is rather anticipation of coming CPUs.
Intel shall soon bump up the front-side bus of Core 2 processors to 1333MHz. One needs a chipset to do this, as well as a microprocessor. The 3 Series is just that chipset.
45-nm Penryn processors are also just around the corner, and boards based on Bearlake will support the Penryn desktop processors, too. These desktop CPUs will also run with a 1333MHz FSB.