Having launched its first Celeron processor based on 0.13micron Tualatin core, Intel felt the necessity in a low-cost chipset to accompany this processor. At first, i815G solution was supposed to be the one, however, it hasn’t been yet recognized by the mainboard manufacturers. That is why Intel made a very logical decision to add Tualatin support to the i810E/E2 chipsets so beloved by the mainboard manufacturers (especially by the OEMs). As a result, there appeared new chipsets known under an old name of i810E/E2 B-step (their distinguishing feature is the ICH chip used).
The most curious thing about them is that Intel hasn’t yet reported any details about this solution. We learned about this newcomer after Elitegroup (ECS) announced its new P6IWM mainboard based on i810E2 and featuring Tualatin support (the initial chipset revision didn’t support CPUs with 0.13micron core). The mainboard boasts pretty standard set of features and is a normal low-cost solution designed in MicroATX form-factor. It supports 66/100/133MHz FSB, has 2 DIMM slots for up to 512MB PC133(!!!)/PC100 SDRAM, 3 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, integrated graphics core (no AGP slot), a CNR slot and ATA/100 support (ICH2).
By the way, i810E2 chipset doesn’t support PC133. Therefore, there is either a mistake in the mainboard specifications or the solution is based on i815EG. However, the first supposition is more probable because there are 2 DIMM slots instead of 3. Moreover, the mistakes in the mainboard specs are a common thing, especially as far as the memory details go.
And one more thing: the official specifications for i810E and i810E2 do officially support 0.13micron CPUs, although it was not the case at the time when i810E2 and i810E, of course, were announced. So, the core stepping has really been changed. The question is when they actually did it...