X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 4)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 05/11/2004 | 11:21 AM ]

Mainboards

We are still waiting for the new generation of Intel’s chipsets, i915/i925. Originally expected at the end of March, they first moved to the end of May, then to the fourth week of June. If we put aside versions about problems with the 90nm tech process and unavailability of the LGA755 Prescott, the delay may be caused by some troubles with chipsets and mainboards proper: with the socket, DDR2 performance or stability of external PCI Express graphics cards. Something of that may really be true, but this is no good anyway.

Extreme people only have the LGA755 socket so far: the notorious Soltek SL-865Pro-775 appeared in April in the Japanese retail net, priced at $155. This is not much even for an ordinary i865-based mainboard coming with a full accessories set. Once again, all other innovations, save for the LGA755 socket, won’t be really needed in this year.

For example, ATI is going to unveil its DDR2 chipsets in the next year only, reasoning that this memory won’t be necessary in this year because of its steep price. The next new chipset from the company (not counting the RS350 in, which is a revision of the RS300), the RS400, will appear in the middle of 2005, with DDR2-667 and PCI Express x16 support. This looks reasonable, especially with respect to DDR2. The PCI Express bus may become necessary a little bit sooner, so ATI will unveil the RS480 and the RX480, Athlon 64 chipsets with support of this interface, in this or next quarter.

Overall, it looks like AMD hit the aim by integrating the memory controller into the Athlon 64. At least, it’s now clear that there won’t be a quick transition to DDR2, so the basic disadvantage of the controller is negated (it’s difficult to implement support of new memory types), while all advantages (performance!) remain. They will be doing this DDR2 transition without any haste throughout the next half a year.

VIA Technologies is of course faster than ATI – they started sampling their PT890 and K8T890 chipsets in April and are going to start mass shipments of the first of them in June. So it is quite probable that you’ll see PT890-based mainboards in shops sooner than i915-based ones. As for platforms for AMD processors, new faces showed up here. It is rumored that Sun and ServerWorks are intending to offer chipsets for the Opteron. Well, considering the recent advances of AMD in this field, this news seems quite credible.