As promised earlier today, Intel Corporation today officially announced its new i865 “Springdale” chipsets as well as Pentium 4 processors with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus and the Hyper-Threading technology.

The full bunch of information about the new core-logic sets and processors can be found in our news-story titled as “Intel Springdale and Pentium 4 2.40C, 2.60C and 2.80C Start Today!”, while we will concentrate on the new i865G in a more in-depth way.

The i865G chipset marks the beginning of the new Intel Stable Image Platform Program unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum in February. Previously code-named Granite Peak, the program provides at least 12 months of chipset hardware and software driver stability for corporate PC buyers. The program provides software image stability that IT managers can use to more easily manage the deployment and maintenance of their PC environments.

Probably you are more interested to learn something about Intel Extreme Graphics 2 core integrated in the new i865G core-logic. Well, I have to greave you a bit. Intel does not provide any information about architecture of Intel Extreme Graphics 2. The only information we have now is that it still uses some techniques from the original Intel Extreme Graphics, but also implements some features that bring us certain benefits in performance.

Intel claims that a typical computer based on i865G can offer roughly 2 times more speed in 3DMark 2001SE benchmark compared to an i845G-powered PC . Obviously Intel is cunning about two times more performance compared with the previous-generation product given that configurations of the PCs was different, however, I still expect Intel Extreme Graphics 2 to have performance close to than that of NVIDIA’s GeForce2 MX400 or maybe even GeForce4 MX420 graphics cards. That is enough to play in Counter Strike or some strategy games, but definitely not enough for Doom III or Windows Longhorn. What is awful, mainstream integrated graphics is nearly 4 years back compared to higher-end desktop solutions.

The Intel 865G chipset is priced at $44 with integrated software RAID, $41 without RAID. The Intel 865PE chipset is priced at $39 with integrated software RAID, $36 without. The Intel 865P chipset is priced at $36 with integrated software RAID, $33 without. Systems and mainboards with these chipsets are currently shipping in volume from a variety of computer and mainboard manufacturers worldwide.