X-bit labs

Intel Grantsdale, Alderwood Chipsets Official Names Revealed?

Category: Chipsets

by Anton Shilov

[ 01/16/2004 | 08:45 PM ]

AnandTech web-site reported presumable official names for Intel’s next-generation chipsets to be out in the second quarter of the year and will engage DDR-II memory, PCI Express bus, Azalia audio and other highly-anticipated technologies.

Intel’s Grantsdale family of chipsets will be officially branded as i915, whereas Alderwood core-logic is expected to be called i925X. The former, as expected, will exist in multiple flavours, while the latter will be a luxury offering for high-end desktop PCs.

Intel Grantsdale-P (Intel i915P) is expected to sport 533 and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus for LGA775 processors, dual-channel DDR-II memory at up to 533MHz, PCI Express x16 port for graphics cards and a rich arsenal of I/O capabilities. Intel is also said to ship Grantsdale-G (Intel i915G) adding Intel Extreme Graphics 3 core to the mentioned list of specifications, Grantsdale-GV (Intel i915GV) without PCI Express x16 as well as Grantsdale-GL (Intel i915GL) with no graphics port and DDR-II support, featuring only 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus for future Celeron processors.

Intel’s Alderwood, from now on presumable to be called i925X, will boast the same technologies as i915P (Intel Grantsdale-P), such as DDR-II and PCI Express, but will also add a feature similar to the famous Performance Accelerating Technology available in i875P.

Both new chipsets from Intel will also deliver some new I/O capabilities, such as 4 Serial ATA-150 ports, 4 PCI Express x1 ports and high-quality low-cost Azalia audio with the new family of Intel’s ICH6 controllers. Furthermore, Intel recently added ICH6W-Caswell into the roadmap that enables Intel Integrated AP technology, which, along with certain integrated Intel and 3^rd party solutions is targeted to provide a low-cost and easy to implement solution for a small wireless home network. The whole software Wi-Fi solution from Intel will not include antenna or other hardware needed to set-up an actual network, so, the whole Intel’s software Caswell may cost additional $10 to $15 to end-user, still a lot cheaper than the vast majority of hardware solutions.

Intel officials did not comment on the story.