4GHz (580) Prescott to arrive Q4, but delay on cards

THE LATEST ROADMAPS seen by the INQ at the Porcupine last week reveal how Intel will introduce its processor numbers, although if you get confused, blame Chipzilla. It started this stuff off to help its customers.

It looks like Intel may push the intro of its first LGA 775 chip back to June, although we've no confirmation on that yet.

The Celeron D - a 340, which is a 2.93GHz, 533 front side bus chip with 256K will be introduced in Q3 of this year, but before that we'll see Prescott core chips at 2.80GHz (335) to 2.53GHz (325).

Intel has designated its non-numbered desktop chips "legacy" chips - these continue in various guises until Q1 2005, with 3.40GHz Pentium 4s using a 90 nano process.

The biggest change in the roadmaps is the adoption of Intel's now famous numbering system, which has got to be as confusing as heck for just about everyone not in the know.

As revealed earlier, Intel will introduce LGA775 versions of its Extreme Edition chips with 2MB of L3 cache in the second quarter.

Meanwhile, Intel has confirmed that it will introduce its 925X Express chipset in June, but without ECC support. There's a bug, and Intel will fix that with an ECC version in July, maybe.

Here's what the new Intel roadmaps look like.

	Q2 04	Q3 04	Q4 04	Q1 05
$1300+	560	570	580	580+
$1000+	550	560	570,560	570,560
$800+	540,530	550,540	550,540	550,540
$700+	520	530, 520	530,520	530,520
$600+	335	340,335	345,340	350,345
$400+	330,325	330,325	335,330	340,335
less $400			325	330,325

The blue background denotes Celerons, the red background Pentium 4s. All you really need to know is that the 580 is a 4GHz Prescott chip.

We understand that Intel has largely cracked the problems on heat on the LGA775 parts - as one source told us, Intel will have no difficulties clocking the chips to 4GHz. µ