The new chipsets from Intel, which are due in May, namely i850E, i845E and i845G, supporting 533MHz processor bus, will have to stay in the market for at least a year (until Q2 2003), according to Intel’s plans. This period of time should be enough for Intel to prepare a replacement for i850E, i845E and i845G: a new chipset generation known now as Springdale family.

According to the info we have at our disposal, Springdale chipsets will support 0.13micron Pentium 4 processors on Northwood core and 0.09micron Pentium 4 processors on Prescott core, which are due in 2003. Note that the Quad Pumped Bus frequency will increase up to 533MHz/677MHz. Also Springdale will acquire AGP 8x support. The new chipsets will feature a new ICH5 South Bridge. The major innovations introduced in ICH5 compared with the predecessor, ICH4 (its major peculiarity is the USB 2.0 hub), will be SerialATA support and integrated Wireless LAN controller. To connect the North and the South Bridges of the Springdale chipsets Intel will use a new Hub Link 2.0 with 1.06GB/sec bandwidth.

Springdale family will include three chipsets: one solution with the integrated graphics core, one discrete mainstream chipset and one discrete high-end chipset. We don’t know yet which memory type Intel will choose to be supported by Springdale chipsets. It might be DDR333, DDR400 or even DDR II. Only one thing is clear now: Intel seems to have given up RDRAM support completely, so that there will be no chipsets working with Rambus memory in 2003.

Springdale mainstream and high-end chipsets will differ only by the memory subsystem from one another. High-End Springdale version will feature dual-channel memory interface, while the mainstream version of this core logic will have one this channels disabled. This way, the high-end chipset will be marked by twice as high memory bandwidth.

I would like to note that Intel will keep promoting i845GL in 2003 as a solution for Celeron CPUs. That is why this chipset has every chance to live a much longer life than i850E, i845E or i845G.