According to our Taiwanese sources, Intel’s integrated i845G chipset has become the most popular solution among the mainboard manufacturers lately. In Q2 Intel managed to sell 4.5 million i845G pieces, which makes this chipset the most popular Pentium 4 solution. If we assume the source is credible, then the total market share of i845G chipset makes now 6%.

Reasons of this popularity are evident. Although this solution announced in May is an integrated one, its features look much more attractive than those of all other chipsets from i845 family. Note that this chipset is the only one of all shipped by Intel supporting (though unofficially) DDR333 SDRAM. At the same time, the graphics core integrated into i845G may be disabled as the chipset supports external AGP 4x interface. This is why most mainboard manufacturers position the solutions based on i845G as expensive High-End mainboards. Moreover, i845G may also be used in Value systems with the integrated graphics core. So, the universal character of this chipset is none of the secrets of its success.

In fact, i845G has one more important advantage. Unlike all other i845 solutions, this chipset is pin-to-pin compatible with the upcoming Intel chipsets supporting DDR333 SDRAM, namely with i845GE and i845PE. That is why the mainboard manufacturers have to invest into the design development only once, thus getting a universal layout for i845G, and the successors, which will be valid for quite a long period of time. This is one more explanation of i845G’s popularity.

The second popular chipset from Intel is a relatively old i845D solution, which doesn’t support even the new Pentium 4 with 533MHz bus. Why is it popular then? Well, because of the very low price: i845D officially sells for $26, while in the gray market its price has fallen down to $20 per unit. At the same time, the new i845E and i845GL solutions failed to prove up to Intel’s expectations and never became as popular among the mainboard makers as their fellows. In fact, there is nothing to be surprised at. Unfortunately, i845E chipset cannot boast better feature set than the competitors, such as SiS645DX, for instance, though it costs quite a lot, and i845GL, which doesn’t support external graphics cards as well as processors with 533MHz bus gets completely defeated by SiS650 for the same reasons.

In this respect Intel decided to adjust the official wholesale prices for its solutions accordingly. This way, today, on August 18, i845G and i845GL are expected to get significantly cheaper. For i845E the mainboard makers will have to pay $30 instead of $32, for i845GL - $26 instead of $29.

Besides, Intel will start shipping one more chipset, which is positioned as an alternative to i845GL. It will be i845GV. This chipset will have no external AGP support, but will be able to work with Pentium 4 with 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus. The mainboard manufacturers will be able to buy i845GV in the second half of August for $28.

Another price reduction for all i845 chipsets is planned for September 29. On that day the prices will be changes as follows:

• i845GE: $37 instead of $39;
• i845G: $35 instead of $37;
• i845PE: $32 instead of $34;
• i845E: $28 instead of $30;
• i845GV: $28 instead of $36;
• i845D: $23 instead of $24;
• i845GL: $25 instead of $26.

Nevertheless, the mainboard manufacturers still consider the new relative chipset prices to be uneven, which may again cause some misbalance in terms of chipsets popularity. However, I dare suppose that by the end of the year the most popular solution will become i845PE, while i845D is very unlikely to lose its positions unless Intel limits the shipments volumes.