Intel just released their latest Pentium 4 chipset the 875P or Canterwood. The initial market for this chipset is for high-end desktop systems and workstation computer systems. As such, it also carries a pretty hefty price tag for the end user similar to the boards based around the older E7205 or Granite Bay chipsets from Intel. A future reduced version of the chipset (codenamed Springdale) will be released in the coming months to replace the very successful 845 series chipsets for more mainstream desktop computer systems.
The chipset specifically is comprised of the 82875P north bridge and ICH5 south bridge. Let's look at some of the features of this chipset:
- Supports 166/200 MHz Frontside Bus Speeds (800/533Mhz CPUs)
- Hyper-Threading Technology Support
- 64-bit Dual Channel DDR 333/400 with ECC Support
- Performance Acceleration Technology
- AGP 8x
- Native Serial ATA Controller
- RAID 0 Support for SATA (with ICH5R chip)
- 8 USB 2.0 Ports
- ATA/100 Legacy Support
- AC '97 Audio
- Integrated 10/100 Controller
- Communication Streaming Architecture (CSA)
The release of the 875P chipset was scheduled to coincide with the new 800 MHz frontside bus Pentium 4 3.0Ghz processor, but Intel found an "anomaly" in the CPUs and delayed the released. Apparently the problem has been corrected and the processors are again shipping to system manufacturers.
800 MHz Frontside Bus & DDR400 Support
One of the primary bottlenecks for computer systems currently is the bus that runs between the CPU and the memory. Currently processors can run much faster than the existing memory can handle and as a result are held back by the memory. Intel has reduced this bottleneck with two major enhancements in the chipset that deal with the frontside bus speed.
The 875P adds support for the latest bus speed of 200 MHz. This allows for the new Pentium 4 "C" processors to run at a quad pumped frontside bus speed of 800 MHz. This is a 20% boost in the frontside bus speed of Intel's current Pentium 4 "B" or 533 MHz processors. This is further boosted by the ability to support the new DDR400 specification memory modules. This dramatically helps to improve the overall performance of the computer systems. Even though the latest processor is 60 MHz slower than the Pentium 4 B 3.06Ghz processor, it should end up being faster overall.
