Intel has Prescott Socket-T motherboard designs

CHIP GIANT INTEL has a fine set of codenames for motherboards it has in development in the second half of this year and the first half of next.

The next year boards will support Socket T, the cunning new socket Intel will introduce to fox its competitors' plans and to support PCI Express.

First, a note. Intel competes with its customers by providing boxed motherboards for its resellers and which use its own chipsets. Some resellers refuse to use third party motherboards and insist on Intel's products, which are most probably these days manufactured by its OEM friend Hon Hai.

Released products end up with boring long alphanumeric strings but before that they have very groovy and evocative code names, which always brings into our mental eye an image of a giant Chipzilla crooning poetry to the megasaur it loves.

What the Love Erratumnotbug chants in 2003
For example, in the second half of this year, Chipzilla will croon Plum Island, Sea Breeze and Hazelton to its paramour, and unless you can pick up the cadences you won't have a clue what the love-struck lizard is on about.

Plum Island is a code name for the hyperthreading enabled D845PEPI, a circuit board which supports DDR 333, the 845E chipset, ICH USB 2, AGP4X and comes in a microATX format.

Seabreeze is more mundanely known as the D845GVSR, a similar board to Plum Island, but including integrated graphics.

Hazelton, on the otehr hand, is the D885GHZ, supporting integrated graphics and AGP8X, two channel DDR 400, having space for two DIMMs and supporting 478 pin CPUs.

Chipzilla Croons Grantsdale to her beau
Everything changes towards the end of this year, because Intel is releasing its famous "John Prescott" microprocessor, and next year it releases its Grantsdale chipsets. So there's a whole new set of mantras Chipzilla will chant then.

The evocative code names are Battle Lake, Powers Lake, Marblehead, Avalon, Augsburg, Eatonville, and Luxemburg.

Battle Lake and Powers Lake are slated to arrive in the second quarter of 2004 and use the Grantsdale P chipsets. The first supports PCI Express, DDR-2 at 533MHz, uses Socket T (775 pin LGA), 1394, RAID, and GD-P. Powers Lake is a similar board but instead of being in an ATX form factor, is a microATX motherboard.

Marblehead, Avalon, Augsburg, Eatonville and Luxemburg are all boards that use the Grantsdale-G chipset, again due to be introduced in the second quarter.

Marblehead is the "Big Water" design that Louis "The XIIIth" Burns talked about last year. It again supports ICH 6, 775 pin Prescotts, GD-G, and PCI Express. Avalon is an ATX board that supports Socket T but only two channel DDR 400, and Augsburg is a microATX board identical otherwise to Avalon.

These will be complemented with Eatonville and Luxemburg, which are identical to Avalon and Augsburg except they support two channel DDR-2 533.

Ah, Plum Island, Sea Breeze and Hazelton. Isn't it lovely to hear La Intella croon? µ