14 DAY TRIAL // Intel is expected to officially start shipping its next generation of high end mainboard chipsets soon, in fact in a few days, enabling motherboard manufacturing companies to begin volume production of X38 based offerings. As a number of X38 chipsets were already distributed under the ''engineering sample'' tag, almost all important mainboard manufacturers are now having X38 compatible boards ready and are only expecting Intel to start shipping the chipsets in quantity.
According to the news site digitimes, Intel is planning the official launch of the X38 high end chipset just in time to compete against AMD's own high end solution, the RD790 chip which is due out in November, if everything goes fine.
The Intel X38 should come with a number of important new features like native support for high speed frontside bus which goes as high as 1333MHz and DDR3 memory modules running at the same speed. Alongside this core improvement, Intel also upgraded the PCI Express system bus to its second version, the PCIe 2.0 and it integrated two full speed, full lanes for graphics cards (two PCI Express x16 slots). As modern day chipsets tend to be quite hot, Intel also plans to make the X38 chip the very first one that uses ISH or integrated heat spreader technology.
While the X38 is not yet on the market and compatible mainboards are only in the planning stages, Intel already has plans for the next generation of even higher performance chipsets, the X48. This new planned chipset will comes as an upgrade for the X38 product as it will support 1600MHz frontside bus and 1600MHz DDR3 memory modules.
As the X48 chipset will preserve many of the technical specifications of its predecessor, mainboard manufacturing companies will not need to redesign their products from scratch in order to support it. Even more, the X38 and X48 will use the very same PCB (printed circuit board) design. It is rumored that the X48 will only make official the overclocking capabilities of the X38 product line as this chipset already can be ramped up to 1600MHz frontside bus as well as 1600MHz DDR3 memories.