Posted on Tuesday, April 17 2007 @ 14:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
One of the announcements from Pat Gelsinger was Intel's plan to license its FSB bus to third parties (including Xilinx and Altera) - a plan which is similar to AMD's Torrenza strategy:
Yesterday, Intel revealed the name for Geneseo—QuickAssist—and now, while roaming around the halls of the Spring Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, the folks at The Inquirer have spotted a Xilinx chip sitting in an Intel motherboard's processor socket.
The processor socket in question is apparently of the 604-pin variety, not the LGA771-type socket that can play host to Intel's Xeon 5100- and 5300-series processors. As for the chip, it's a Virtex 5, which Xilinx claims is the world's first 65nm field-programmable gate array. According to The Inquirer, the Socket 604 Virtex 5 isn't a mere prop or development prototype—it's actually a fully functional production unit. Current models are designed to accommodate 800MHz front-side bus speeds, and 1066MHz FSB variants are reportedly up and running in Xilinx's labs.
