Intel today officially introduced its long-awaited E7205 chipset also known as GraniteBay. The industry was expecting the newcomer impatiently since its performance should be close or even higher to that of the i850E core-logic with lower price of the final personal computer system.

Intel`s E7205 chipset supports 400 and 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus of the Pentium 4 processors, can take advantage of the Hyper-Threading technology support, provides AGP 8x and dual-channel PC1600/2100 DDR SDRAM memory. The peak bandwidth offered by dual-channel PC2100 is 4.2GB per second, exactly equals to 533MHz Quad-pumped Pentium 4 bus. The North Bridge (or MCH) works in collaboration with the ICH4 I/O controller, supporting USB 2.0 and other necessary features.

Intel E7205 core-logic set is priced at $57 in 1000 units quantities, more than $10 compared to i850E chipset. Nevertheless, systems based on the Granite Bay will cost significantly less compared to a PC with i850E inside. Currently PC2100 DDR SDRAM memory is very cheap, while PC1066 RDRAM is still times expensive compared to DDR.

The novelty is intended for entry-level workstations. A lot of mainboard manufacturers as well as personal computer vendors already started to offer E7205 powered products.

See also:

Intel “Granite Bay” E7205 Based Mainboard from MSI
Intel “Granite Bay” E7205 Based Mainboard from Gigabyte Technology
E7205 “Granite Bay” Based Mainboard from DFI
Intel to Announce E7205 “Granite Bay” Core Logic On Monday
CanterWood: The Successor of the Granite Bay