Intel talks Extreme quad chips

INTEL HAD A PRESS conference today at CeBIT giving a general overview of its current and upcoming technologies.

Most of it will be old news to regular readers so we will skip the 45 nanometre, G965 drivers and the X series chipsets and focus on two tidbits.

First off, Intel said that the upcoming XtREme Core Number Numeral CPUs will all be quad cores. The current Conroe 2.93 will be the last of them, from this point on, they will be Kentsfields and it's 45nm successor.

All the dualies will be normal E-class parts. With the next step of Kentsfield hitting clock partity with current Conroes, there is not down side to this, unless you count not getting a 3.xx Conroe, but that is pretty minor.

The other interesting bit was the video decoding capabilities of the new G- variant of the X series chipsets. They will all play back HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but they may not all be officially logo-certified. There is a difference between working and paying a lot of money to fund DRM research in the form of a sticker.

The good thing here is that Intel said there will be a user-downloadable DRM infection compatible driver. This is a really good thing, I mean that. OK, it is evil and broken, but it hurts the end user far less than the OEM bull they have to suffer through now because of MS and the content mafia.

In general, the new chipsets look really good. The upcoming X38 is the one the geeks will love, but that is for IDF or Computex. In the mean time, there is enough from Intel here to keep you busy. µ