Although last summer VIA managed to win a significant part of the chipset market, large OEMs still prefer Intel chipsets. On the one hand, Intel owes this success to its i810 chipset with the built-in graphics core, which is very popular among system integrators due to its low cost ($18). It appears the best solution for fully fledged low-cost systems. Nevertheless, even a newer version of this chipset, i810E2 looks a bit outdated. It doesn’t support PC133 SDRAM and hence the integrated graphics core making use of the system memory performs unsatisfactory. That’s why in July Intel is going to introduce a couple of new sets of core logic: i815G and i815EG destined to replace i810.
New chipsets from i8150G/EG family will be based on B-step of i815 chipset, which doesn’t support the external AGP port. So, unlike i810, i815G/EG chipsets will support new Tualatin based processors and PC133 SDRAM, which increases the performance of the graphics subsystem using UMA architecture. I815G will feature an ICH for the South Bridge and hence will support only ATA/66, while i815EG will be equipped with ICH2 supporting ATA/100.
Of course, the launching of i815G/EG, which shouldn’t be more expensive than i810E2 will automatically result into discontinuing of the i810 chipset. So, the entire Intel chipset family will be completely unified. Intel will target all sorts of i815 chipset versions (including those without the integrated graphics – i815EP, and those without the support for external AGP – i815EG) for almost all the market sectors except servers and workstations.