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Canterwood Motherboards Refined
YingYang writes "With Intel's i875P (otherwise known as Canterwood) chipset launch a couple of
weeks ago, we were shown what an 800MHz System Bus can do for performance of the
Pentium 4. At the time however, there were few Taiwanese OEM motherboards out and test-beds used to showcase the new chipset and throttled-up P4, were based on Intel designed motherboards. Now however, the Canterwoods are beginning to flow out of Taiwan and vendors like
Abit and Asus have put together boards with a ton of integrated features and performance, that reminds us of the days of the 'BX,' when Intel chipsets were the only way to fly. Check out
this Abit/Asus Canterwood head to head comparison at HotHardware."
This is the chip that kills intel's god awful dependency on rambus, about time. VIA did release a chipset that supported ddr quite some time back IIRC, but the performance was god awful so it was 'overlooked'. It appears as if this one beats out rambus on performance which is a "good thing"(tm)
It allows the cable to flow more naturally out and away from the motherboard.... Also, it moves the insertion and removal stress lateral to the MB, so you don't flex it....
This could very well put the desktop performance lead firmly into Intel's hands.
The 3.0 GHz P4 with 200 MHz FSB and dual channel DDR400 should handily beat the Athlon XP 3200+, and it will likely be priced less initially since Intel expects to introduce a 3.2 GHz part at the same time. That part will have a large performance margin over anything AMD has or will introduce this year.
I don't think they will get this technology into the Xeons soon enough to fight off Opteron, though, or even to take the performance lead for x86 servers.
Do you really want them to go away? I am perfectly content with Intel having a deathgrip on #1 and setting standards, with smaller companies like AMD providing price/performance competition to keep them honest.
What Future?