What exactly is Chipzilla's Diamondville?

27 Mar 2008 | 19:29 GMT

By Charlie Demerjian

DIAMONDVILLE IS THE new desktop version of Silverthorne, that much is news to no one. The real question is what makes it different from Silverthorne?

It is quite simple, take a standard Silverthorne and swap out the Poulsbo chipset for a 945 variant, most likely the i945GM something for lower power and cost. The power is the easier part, there are two bins, 4 and 8W TDPs, so if you subtract out the 2W of CPU TDP, that doesn't leave much for the chipset. This means a really skimpy feature set on the southbridge, at least for the 4W SKU.

One thing it does do is lower the price. Digitimes has reported that Diamondville will be about $15 cheaper than Silverthorne, and that is probably caused by a mass-market chipset vs a specialized one.

Then again, list pricing is very different from OEM pricing, so who knows? In the end, it is just an Intel chipset. µ

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