Intel will offer two versions of its Canterwood chipset for different purposes and products. Our sources indicated that Intel’s i875P chipset known under the code-name Canterwood is primarily aimed at high-end desktop and workstation market segment, while Intel’s Canterwood-ES core-logic is designed for UP Rack servers.

Intel’s Canterwood family of chipsets supports Intel Pentium 4 processors with 400/533/800MHz Quad Pumped Bus and the Hyper-Threading technology. Two DDR SDRAM channels are capable of working with PC3200/2700/2100 DDR SDRAM memory with ECC. In order to further boost memory performance, Intel implements special Performance Acceleration Technology that implies better optimized interaction with the memory subsystem by removing a few stages from the memory addressing procedures and will also use more aggressive memory timings. The difference between chipsets lies in I/O controllers: i875P comes with ICH5R that supports USB 2.0 as well as Serial ATA-150 RAID0, while for the UP Rack server market, Canterwood-ES is paired with the ICH-S (Hance Rapids) South Bridge, which provides 64-bit PCI required by entry-level servers.

Currently i845PE chipset is utilised in UP Rack servers, so, transition to Canterwood-ES platform should give a considerably gain in performance of such machines. Note that for mainstream and higher-end servers totally different platforms are expected to come.