Intel to Discuss Alderwood, Grantsdale Platforms Tomorrow

by Anton Shilov
05/31/2004 | 03:56 PM

Intel Corporation will discuss its forthcoming chipsets formerly code-named Alderwood and Grantsdale on the 1^st of June, 2004. The chipsets will not only bring some performance enhancements, but will ignite the brand-new era in the PC industry by beginning the transition to PCI Express interconnection that will eventually replace conventional PCI bus that has been in use for more than a decade.

“These platforms represent the most compelling platform architectural changes in a decade. Never before has one platform provided the opportunity for such revolutionary changes in how we live, work, learn and play as the Intel i925X and i915 Express chipset family with the Intel Pentium 4 processor supporting HT technology,” a source close to Intel said.

New core-logic sets from Intel - i915G, i915P, i925X and derivatives – will bring dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM memory, PCI Express x16 and x1 lanes for add-in cards, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 (i915G only), 4 Serial ATA-150, high-definition (Azalia) audio as well as some other important capabilities, such as integrated WLAN or promising RAID technologies.

Intel’s i925X core-logic set will deliver from 2% to 7% performance increase over systems powered by Intel’s former flagship offering i875P at the same clock-speed of central processing unit, according to the information from Intel.

“The Intel 925X Express chipset’s high performance architecture, delivers additional system-level performance via enhanced memory pipelining that enables a higher utilization of each memory channel, improving data access. The result is a performance optimized platform optimizing data transfers between the processor and system memory for platforms configured with 800MHz system bus and DDR2 memory. The new Memory Controller Hub design includes wider internal data buses that support dual-channel DDR2 memory technology at 533MHz or 8.53 GB/s of peak memory bandwidth, for improved platform  performance. The new architecture also supports both asynchronous and true isochronous data traffic, with dedicated internal pipelines and specialized arbitration. In addition, the Intel 925X MCH has improved ‘electricals’ with optimized ball-out for better latency with an additional bypass enabled. These enhancements enable the Intel 925X Express chipset to take full advantage of the performance of these new high-speed interfaces,” people familiar with Intel’s plans noted.

Traditionally, Intel’s high-end chipsets have been outperforming mainstream core-logic sets by a tiny margin because of higher memory performance and lower latencies.

In Q3 2004 Intel will reportedly relese i925XE chipset with 1066MHz PSB and possibly some other enhancements.

Intel Corp.’s officials did not comment on the report.