Sources close to Intel confirmed today that Intel would be pushing forward its Pentium 4 CPU in a more aggressive way that they had planned before. In the beginning of the year, as you may remember, Intel was going to make Pentium 4 occupy 50% of its product range. But now these plans have changed. By the end of the year the company plans to have three Pentium 4 processors out of every four CPUs for performance desktops produced.
So, one of the tasks Intel is trying to solve now is to assure mainboard manufacturers of the necessity to introduce more boards for Pentium 4 CPU. This task may appear quite hard to fulfill because in Q4 2001 Intel will be launching a new 0.13micron Pentium 4 Northwood, which will require new boards with Socket478. That’s why Intel plans to start massive promotion of its Pentium 4 processor in August, when the first CPUs (based on Willamette core) intended for the new Socket appear.
We asked a couple of mainboard manufacturers to comment on this situation. According to what we received from them, the schedule for Socket478 board will look as follows:

• August – September 2001: Mainboards based on Brookdale supporting PC133 SDRAM. Also we should then see i850 based Socket478 boards supporting RDRAM, though these solutions will be offered by far not all the manufacturers.
• November – December 2001: VIA PX266 based mainboards supporting DDR SDRAM. Also the launching of SiS645 based products supporting DDR memory too is planned for the same timeframe.
• January – February 2002: Intel Brookdale based mainboards with DDR SDRAM support are expected to appear at the time.

So, in the beginning of next year there will be the whole bunch of all sorts of Pentium 4 mainboards. The boards will be not only based on the chipsets by different manufacturers but will also support different memory types. We would also like to point out that the mainboard manufacturers mention neither ATI nor ALi chipsets so far, even though these companies have recently received Intel’s licenses for Pentium 4 chipsets development. Probably, they won’t be able to finish their products before the end of the year. We have also to stress that as soon as Brookdale starts supporting DDR memory, the mainboard manufacturers will cease the production of their Brookdale based products with PC133 SDRAM support. There is nothing to be surprised at, in fact, DDR and PC133 SDRAM are expected to cost more or less the same money by then and PC133 SDRAM slows down Pentium 4 quite tangibly because of the relatively low bus bandwidth, especially compared with Quad Pumped Bus.