New Chipsets : Springdale/Canterwood
On to the more exciting stuff which we heard today. As far as Intel are concerned CPU speed is given and assumed, but the other parts within the system need to make sure they retain the speed which the CPU has. These are I/o, memory, audio, and storage. There is little point in having a high speed CPU running with a 3600RPM hard drive - if you need the highest performance then you need to have all the subsystems to grasp this. Intel have 2 new chipsets; Springdale (Mainstream), and Canterwood (Highend/Performance).
Canterwood
Canterwood will feature an 800MHz FSB, Dual Channel DDR400, AGP 8X, Serial ATA, Software RAID, and PAT. PAT is a new initiative from intel which is Performance Accelerator Technology. This is designed to give high speed computing. Unfortunately the details are somewhat sketchy at the moment but this chipset is aimed at the highend performance user - such as gamers and hardware enthusiasts.
Springdale
Springdale is very similar to Canterwood but carries the new Intel Extreme Graphics - this is why it is aimed at the mainstream market. The chipset apart from that is very similar to that of the Canterwood. Intel say that thee peformance increase is around 30% compared to that of 845G graphics. But they did make the point it is not there to compete with the likes of ATI/NVIDIA on the high end graphics front.
Note : Both chipsets support HT CPUs.
Intel also mentioned that the Prescott CPU is coming along, with the 1MB L2 Cache, it will also have an 800MHz FSB, Enhanced Netburst and HyperThreading, and with 13 new instructions - they would not reveal any other information at this time.
