Intel Roadmap Update June 1999 Part 3: Desktop Chipset and Mobile CPU Roadmap

I840 Or 'Carmel'

Carmel will be the new performance chipset for workstation and servers, running with Slot1 or Slot2, Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon. It will also offer AGP4x, RDRAM-support and 133 MHz FSB, but it will add the following:

• Quad processor support
• Dual-RDRAM interface, offering a peak bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s
• 64-bit PCI ('normal' PCI is only 32-bit wide)
• up to 8 GB of memory (Camino only offers 1 GB)
• MRH-S (Memory-Repeater-Hub for SDRAM) offers SDRAM-support at high bandwidth through up to 4-way interleaving

At the same time there won't be any support of PC700 RDRAM.

I810e

Wow, this one is my favorite out of them all! Are you also wondering what the little 'e' means behind the now well known 'i810'? Well, it doesn't mean much really, but it makes i810e a new product. The difference over i810 is merely the 'support of 133 MHz FSB' and a 133 MHz display-cache bus. Wow! This means you can plug your expensive new Pentium III 533/133 or Pentium III 600/133 into a platform with this low cost integrated chipset. That's what we all ever dreamt of, hampering the intoxicating performance of a new Intel-CPU with a chipset that offers mediocre graphics performance. This combination will indeed show how 'indispensable' SSE is. A 3D-application gets first accelerated by SSE-instructions to be slowed down right afterwards by i810e's slow 3D-graphics. I really wonder how successful Intel's marketing will be with this combination, because one thing is for sure, nobody needs it! Even in an office environment where you wouldn't require 3D, you don't require 133 MHz FSB and SSE either and can happily work with i810 and Celeron 466 or 500, saving a very decent amount of money.

Solano

This chipset is almost the most boring out of the bunch of new chipset. It's nothing than a 'tuned' i810e-chipset to me. The difference to the lovely i810e is the introduction of 'Command per Clock' = CPC 'for great graphics performance' (whatever Intel means by that) and the support of AGP4x for an external (!!!) AGP-3D-card. Now what shall we say about that one? Intel realized that their integrated graphics solution isn't quite good enough! Therefore Solano will still come with integrated i75x-graphics, but it will enable you to add a different 3D-card if you like. This 3D-card can make usage of AGP4x, but unfortunately there isn't any RDRAM-support. PC100 with CPC has to do it for Solano, I wonder if this will be good enough. As a matter of fact I doubt it, but people who were talked into building or buying a PIII-platform with i810 will certainly love Solano just as much. Long live Intel's marketing deparment!