Intel Chipsets
Intel's chipset roadmap for Q2 is largely unchanged from what I reported back in the Q1 article, so I'll just go over things briefly.Granstdale (i915P) is the chipset people have heard most about. The newest mainstream bridge, it supports 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. PCI-Express is the graphics interconnect of choice for i9xx.
A series of derivative bridges based on i915P, some featuring Intel's new DX9 integrated graphics core: Extreme Graphics II, will also be launched in Q3 (i915GV, i910GL), to bring the bridge to lower price points. More on those in the Q3 article.
Alderwood (i925X) is essentially Grantsdale with PAT, but with more implementation limitations then Grantsdale. It will only drive 800MHz bus processors and DDR-II memory, and keeps the LGA775 socket limitation of Grantsdale.
As for release dates, Intel's latest April 1st roadmap update states June, but fails to give any concrete date. I was expecting reviews of parts of the platform by the end of April, but that's clearly not going to happen. Reference platforms are out and about for people to evaluate (pulling out graphics cards while the system is running, then putting them back to find the system hasn't missed a beat, is cool!), but reviews and full evaluation will have to wait.
ICH6/ICH6R/ICH6W are the bridges of choice for i9xx, the base bridge supporting PCI-Express 1x and 6 full, native SATA150 ports.
The R version supports 6 drive RAID and the W version carries a wireless access point built in to the bridge.
Intel's roadmaps state they've got an ECC bug in the B0 and B1 steppings of current i925X bridge which have been released to board makers and will be used in retail hardware. It's fixed in the latest RTM B2 stepping, but if you're intending to use ECC with an early Alderwood, get your favourite board maker to verify its operation first.
