14 DAY TRIAL // INTEL has been working hard in order to roll out the Core 2 Duos. At the moment of launch, the Athlon 64 family was ahead of the Netburst CPUs and - as it turns out - these CPUs were already running at their limit (initially INTEL was going to release a 4GHz NetBurst CPU but they realized that 4GHz is too much for a stock air cooled processor). Then the Core 2 Duos appeared and changed the world of computing.
Now don't think that INTEL has forgotten about NetBurst. There are still a lot of old Pentiums and Celerons on the market and they will probably live another 6-9 months depending on the stocks. Because the 975x and p965 chipsets were designed for NetBurst CPUs at first they still have support for older CPUs but that won't last for long. INTEL has announced that its new "3" architecture will not support NetBurst CPUs.
The mainstream P35, entry-level IGP G33, high-end X38, integrated mainstream chipset G35, entry-level Q33 and mainstream business-oriented chipset Q35 are INTEL's offer for 2007. All will support FSB 1333, but at the same time they will also work with FSB 800 for cheaper dual cores. The Pentium 2000 series and Celeron 400 series will also be supported.
In case you want a quad core, only P35, G35 and X38 will work for you. INTEL says that X38 is the only one which will support the Xtreme version of the dual cores, but I really don't think that the top end Core 2 Duos will only work with X38. But what's really important here is that the 3 family will also support the future 45nm products, including the quad-core Yorkfield and dual-core Wolfdale.
All this seems like a nice story, but I think that reality has its own pace and in practice, the CPU support will come out quite different. Remember the 945 line which wasn't among the approved chipsets fore Core 2 Duos? All 945 boards finally received unofficial support just because the manufacturers wanted to do that. And I have a feeling that history will repeat itself. Again.