New budget chipset from Intel ; The i848P.

X-bit Labs reports about the i848P chipset from Intel, a chipset Intel has talked very little about. Intel has not made a loud announcement of this chipset and probably won't, but has added a page to its website about the i848P.

This is a chipset for budget computers which demand all the latest features like 800MHz FSB support, AGP 8x, Serial ATA and DDR400.

Another interesting thing is that motherboards build with this chipset support the new upcoming CPU from Intel, the Prescott according to this article from X-bit Labs.

As we said earlier, the i848P is a derivative from the i865 “Springdale” architecture with support for 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, only single-channel PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory, AGP8x, HyperThreading technology, Communication Streaming Architecture featuring a Dedicated Network Bus (DNB) interface for wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet and so in. Additionally, the i848P can work with the latest I/O controllers from Intel – ICH5 and ICH5R – with Serial ATA-150 and USB 2.0 support.

The i848P is not likely to put much pressure on the previous generation of chipsets, dubbed i845-series, throughout a quarter from now, because it is priced at $31 (with ICH5), while the i845PE costs $23 (with ICH4); however, it will substitute the i845 family late this year or early next year when even entry-level PC segment require Serial ATA-150 and AGP 8x support.

Here is a schematic image of this chipset. Also note that Intel made a mistake in the scheme, the i848P his maximum memory bandwidth is not 6.40GB/s but 3.20GB/s because it does not supports dual channel memory modus.

Source : X-bit Labs