According to some non-official sources, the North Bridge of Intel 845 (Brookdale) chipset will have the same Flip-Chip package as for Intel 850. It is related that currently Intel is negotiating with chip package companies in Taiwan planning to place corresponding orders.
What is Intel up to? The trick is that the package given is pretty costly. It was OK for Intel 850 (this chipset was quite expensive itself and Flip-Chip didn’t tell significantly on the price), while for Intel 845 with its expected $40 it may turn loss-making luxury. Of course, there are objective grounds to use the expensive package: the core of Intel 845 emits too much heat (mostly because of a faster front side bus of Pentium 4 CPU) for the common BGA to dissipate it successfully. And Flip-Chip is specially designed for this purpose (that’s why it is used for Pentium III, Athlon and other CPUs).
As we learned, to make i845 chipset profitable, Intel will have to find someone who would agree to pack the chips for $6-9 per item. Our source asserts that such variant looks highly problematic.
The outcome is that the initial $40 that will be paid by the mainboards manufacturers for each Intel 845 will be scarcely cut this year. We doubt that Intel will deliberately put itself in gainless conditions. In its turn, that will hardly lead to a price-drop for Intel 845-based mainboards till the level of those based on i815E/EP. And it would be so nice...