2004 Prescott, Tejas chips to have new socket, chipsets

RELIABLE SOURCES SAID that future Prescott and Tejas CPUs from Intel will use an LGA 775 pin out and the Springdale and Canterwood chipsets that are due to be launched in Q2 this year will be displaced by "Grantsdale" chipsets and use Intel ICH6.

LGA stands for land grid array, a switch from pin grid array. LGA is much cheaper than PGA or BGA (ball grid array), and is a technology used by IBM, as an example. It's upgradeable, too.

Next year, the 865G will be replaced by the Grantsdale-G, the 865P and 865PE by the Grantsdale-P, while the 845GL/GV chipset, which lasts through this year, will be subsumed by the Grantsdale GL.

Meanwhile Intel is pressing on with its hyperthreading plans, as earlier revealed here. The project is called "HT Rolling Thunder" and is based on HT with an 800MHz bus and using the 875 and 865 chipsets. Intel is expected to show demonstrations to its partners at the CeBIT show, in Hannover Germany soon.

Intel will then also unveil its "stability programme" for chipsets, codenamed Granite Peak.

And more details have emerged about its 875P chipset, which uses "Performance Acceleration Technology", or PAT. This uses a new type of memory access for additional performance, and will be aimed at the "enthusiast" and high end market. The performance achievements will be made using the 875P Canterwood chipset, and don't need a special kind of memory. µ