14 DAY TRIAL // When you live in Intel's world, it feels much like playing a video game, a strategy to be exact. You make the decisions to lead your army of warriors into battle, conquer new territories, build better chips that consume less power and offer greater performance, to battle from time to time with AMD, kick dirt in their face, do what you have to do? as they say, everything is fair in love and war. But Intel is playing this "game" at a larger scale, with the consequences of their actions being supported by the general public.
It appears that they have this strategy well thought out, and, like in a chess game, they have their future moves already planned, just waiting for the good moment to call it: checkmate. However, Intel isn't quite following the rules of this game, by letting the opponent know their future actions. This move, although not very smart, has another target, to scare off the opponent/s, and to attract the public. That is why some news about a new generation of chipsets has leaked, before their latest chipset even hit the market, but I guess they know what they are doing.
In the second quarter of 2008, Intel will release Eaglelake, another new generation chipset set to replace Bearlake. Eaglelake will come in two flavors, Eaglelake-P and Eaglelake-G, and, as we have previously seen how Intel names its products, the -G version will have integrated graphics and the -P version of the chipset will not. The chipset will support dual-core Wolfdale and quad-core Yorkfield processors, built on the 45nm manufacturing process, with a 1333MHz FSB, and PCI-Express 2.0.
Unlike Bearlake, where only one of the derivatives will have PCI-Express 2.0 support, the X38 chipset, Eaglelake in both versions will support this feature, bringing the speed up to 5GT/Link, as opposed to 2.5GT/Link, the maximum currently supported bandwidth. The memory controller on Eaglelake will support DDR3-1333, with an expected support for DDR2-800, seeing as how DDR3 will not become a part of the mainstream up until 2009.
On the Eaglelake-G, it isn't known what type of performance the IGP would yield, but features such as Display Port, HDMI, DVI, and HDCP will be available, alongside the Clear Video engine HD-DVD and Blu-ray support. CPU bottlenecking won't be a problem thanks to the Bitstream Processing/Entropy Decode, Frequency Transform, Pixel Prediction and Deblocking features. Also a new southbridge is in order, and Intel is preparing the ICH10 for Eaglelake, which will see the end of PS/2 and LPT ports, but will include a 10Gbit Ethernet controller, Wireless Ethernet controller, improved power consumption and possibly a hardware-based firewall as well.
