Let us make a few comments.
We would like to point out right away that the prices of i850 and i845 in the table above arouse some grave doubts of ours. As far as we know from our sources among the mainboard manufacturers (see this news story), they buy the first one for around $45, and i845 – for around $34-$36 (A3 stepping) and $36-$38 (B0 stepping).
It seems pretty strange that Tehama-E (i850 with 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus support) will cost in April less than its Brookdale-E counterpart supporting DDR SDRAM. Especially since Intel positions its RDRAM solutions as high-performance ones, while DDR SDRAM solutions are said to be for the Value market. Anyway, we have already discussed this issue here, so, we won’t dwell on it anymore.
Note that despite Intel’s great desire to replace i810 by i815G completely by the end of the year, both chipset families (intended mainly for the OEM market) are present and will be present in Intel’s price-list at least until Q2 2002. There is nothing to be surprised at, actually, as the advantages of i815G family over the i810 predecessor are quite insignificant (support of PC133 SDRAM and 6 memory banks instead of 4).
If we take the data listed in the table above for granted, we will be able to conclude that all the four new chipsets for Pentium 4 processors will come out in April. Here are their basic features for your reference. Brookdale-G (i845 supporting 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus and boasting an integrated graphics core), Brookdale-E (i845 supporting 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus), Brookdale-GL (i845 without the external AGP graphics support, will be intended for Celeron/Willamette-128).
And the last thing we would like to stress. It is really surprising how Intel manages to retain its leadership and great popularity among the mainboard makers and customers with high prices like that...