Intel lines up schedule for dual core chips

The answer appears to be that it's streaming ahead, although actual products and motherboards are unlikely to be available until the third quarter of next year for people to buy.

Most of the elements of the Lakeport/Glenwood chipsets have their schedules aligned, including ICH7, Tekoa Gigabit Ethernet, and Ekron 10/100.

That's true too for the software infrastructure, with most of the components flying through the different stages to be ready between weeks 10 to 18 of 2005.

The Smithfield CPUs - dual core 90 nanometre processors using the LGA775 socket, will also be more or less ready when Glenwood and Lakeport going into production, barring glitches during the different processes, of course.

Intel obviously realises that if you're going to use its processors in small boxes or as the hub of a digital home, heat and sound need to be minimised.

And it also is lining up a number of ducks to offer some additional features for such digital hubs, including PCI Express based TV tuners. Three of the big hard drive makers are also in the scheme of things, as this diagram sketched out on the back of a beer mat, illustrates.

As we revealed earlier, Glenwood, Lakeport-G, and Lakeport-P are all "Smithfield" ready. Lakeport and Glenwood are slated for release in Q2, and will support 1066MHz system buses as well as DDR2-667 memory. The memory modules are expected to be ready in Q2 and Q3.

We have the feeling that all these different memory types are beginning to collide with each other. DDR2-533 is obviously more expensive than DDR2-400, while DDR2-667 will be more expensive again.

Intel will likely have to revisit its motherboard strategy again with different SKUs enabling and disabling different features offered by the additional RAID features, PCI Express ports and by Energy Lake, all elements of its ICH7 strategy. µ

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Intel dual core chipset details disclosed