Intel revealed not a long time ago their latest mainboard chipsets for Intel Pentium4 processors. They are the i865 (Springdale) and i875 (Canterwood), slightly different and featuring many new improvements.
The obvious new features are the 800MHz FSB and Dual-DDR configuration which allows the processor using its full bandwidth. By the Granite Bay (GB) chipset release, only the i850 could live up to the large bandwidth the Pentium4 processors are capable of. Unfortunately it featured the Ramburs memory which had high latency times and costs. Unlike the Ramburs, the DDRAM has low latencies and boosts an impressive performance if used correctly. What do I mean by saying correctly? Simple, by running in Dual-DDR mode.
By the time Intel released their first Dual-DDR chipset, the Granite Bay, there was the i845PE/GE, a much better revision of the original i845. The i845PE brought support for the Hyper-Threading Pentium4 processors to the overwhelmed DDRAM bus. The main problem of this solution was the lack of memory bandwidth. Practically the processor was only able to use only half of its bandwidth because of the single DDRAM configuration. You can look as id there were four pipelines for the processor and only two for the memory. The Pentium4 loves memory bandwidth, we all know that. That is why Intel needed a solution to solve this issue and make full use of Pentium4’s efficiency. This is how the Granite Bay chipset born.
Head over the
TechConnect.ws for the review
Jun 19, 2003, 08:08 AM
