Intel dual core chipset details disclosed

SOURCES FROM people close to Intel's plans showed us details of what the firm intends to do with its Glenwood and Lakeport chipsets next year at Oliver's Bar in Dublin earlier this week and at something like two o'clock in the morning.

Don't forget, Intel's Leixlip fabrication plant is based in Dublin too, and some Chipzilla folk are always up for the craic.

While Intel was preparing Her Majesty's Press for its "right hand turn" later in the week, it has already been chatting to its customers about a number of elements in Glenwood and Lakeport, which will support the chip firm's "Smithfield" SKUs.

It will move to enable samples of its ICH7 A0 steppings just as soon as it can, but the important thing to know is that Glenwood and Lakeport support a number of features relating to its next generation CPUs.

Features of Glenwood and Lakeport include 1066MHz front side buses, twin channel DDR2-667, four Serial ATA-II, RAID 0/1/5/10 AHCI, iAMT (active management technology), ADD2+ Media Card, PCI Express X16 GFX, eight USB 2.0, and six PCI Express X1 expansion slots.

Intel talked a little about iAMT at its last Developer Forum, but essentially this allows hardware and software asset tracking, secures third party storage, allows remote troubleshooting, and in general remote management of corporations' PCs.

As usual, Intel will offer these in different SKUs.

The MCH memory controller for Lakeport and for Glenwood are basically the same, but Intel will offer a Glenwood version which will support 8GB ECC memory support, and give maybe a five per cent performance boost over the other one.

The MCH supports dual DDR-2 memory channels, and better memory addressing and arbitration. These chipsets will support Smithfield, Prescott and Cedar Mill CPUs.

ICH 7, in general, will support the six PCIe ports, iMST, which is matrix storage technology, and something called Energy Lake.

Its PCI Express Tekoa controller will support 10/100/1000 Ethernet.

Two SKUs for Smithfield - Intel's dual core chip, will be offered at the performance market, while the other will be a mainstream chip. A better sort of Speedstep comes with the 6XX CPUs in Q1 next year, this is a sort of "Cool and Light" mechanism which will only need BIOS upgrades and motherboards supporting dynamic VIDs. Intel hopes this technology will quieten down PCs ready for the "Digital Home" - although that won't be the Centrino like brand name Chipzilla will coin.

So there will be ICH7, ICH7DH, ICH7DO, ICH7DE, and ICH7R - three of these will be aimed at the Digital Home brand, with the DH flavour supporting Energy Lake.

Digital Enterprise will give large corporations RAID5, while ICH7 Digital Office includes those managebility features above.

While Intel is close to sampling A0 Glenwood and Lakeport chipsets, with estimates being November/December, realistically samples worth qualifying aren't expected until February or March next year. DDR2-667 modules will be ready for customers in the first quarter of nextyear but won't go into production until the third quarter of next year. µ

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