There is quite a rumor cloud hovering around Intel's new G45 Express (Eaglelake-G) and G43 Express desktop chipsets that feature integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator. The cloud is about to disperse, as the first details about the chipsets make their way on the web.

First of all, Intel plans to release the two chipsets sometime during the second quarter of 2008, soon after the launch of the "notorious" P45 chipset. The exact date is much of a speculation than certitude, but rumor has it that the chispets will arrive in late April.

Intel is almost ready with the upcoming G45 chipset, that will finally be branded as GMA X4500HD. The second chip, the G43, is a new TTM (time-to-market) stock-keeping unit (SKU) for cost-effective Vista Premium logo certification.

This means that the G43 will allow motherboard manufacturers to get their motherboard products certified for Windows Vista Premium at a lower cost than a more "picky" chipset will do. You may wonder how they are different, given the fact that their naming conventions place them in the same family.

The answer is simple: while the G45 comes with hardware acceleration for decompressing VC1/AVC video streams, the G43 lacks this feature. Moreover, the G45 supports two DIMM memory modules per channel, while the G43 can only accept one.

Shortly, what the G43 chip lacks are hardware acceleration for the decoding of VC1 and AVC HD video streams, as well as support for more than 2 DIMM memory modules. The G43-powered motherboard users will have to either use the CPU or the dedicated graphics card in order to hardware decode VC1 and AVC video streams.

Intel's benchmarks executed using 3DMark show that the G45 chipset is allegedly 1.7 times faster than G35, with three times the performance of G33.