To Thread... as posted on Yahoo by oldtimerinvestor:
theregister.co.uk
Posted 19/10/99 8:12am by Mike Magee
Intel's i840 is a chipset that works
When we met Raghu Murthi, the workstation marchitecture manager at Intel Dupont last Friday, he would
not publicly comment about the i840 chipset and associated motherboard which the company launches on
the 25th of October next.
But he did enthuse about how his team had designed a powerful and very wonderful chipset and fell into a
cunning British hack trap when we asked: "Shouldn't you guys have designed the i820 then?" To his credit,
he blushed. Murthi had obviously not had time to read the now famous Intel document on how to deal with
British hacks.
Sources outside Intel have now supplied us with many more details about the Outrigger (OR840) mobo
which is Intel's contribution to the i840 party and which supports the famous Coppermine products which
the company will introduce next Monday. Err...we didn't get them from Mr Murthi.
The OR840 has support for both AGP 4X and AGP Pro 5, and has four RIMM sockets which will support
up to 2Gb of Rambus memory.
These Rambus slots support both ECC and non-ECC direct RDRAM at speeds of 600/800MHz, and take
64Mb, 128Mb, 256Mb and 512Mb. As far as we know, the 512Mb modules, however, are not shipping
yet.
The board supports dual Pentium IIIs of 533MHz and above, using the 133MHz system bus, as we
revealed earlier, and has five PCI slots as well as supporting Ultra ATA/66 IDE. This last Intel terms as an
Xcelerator, it supports two independent channels for four IDE devices and includes DMA-66 and CD Rom
support.
AGP Pro 50 (5.0) is of some interest. This spec runs at data transfer rates of 266MHz and Intel claims it
will achieve data throughput rates of up to 1Gbps. It has a dedicated AGP Pro 50 slot which is backwards
compatible to AGP 4x. The 50 referes to 50 watts maximum power consumption and it has the same data
transfer rate as AGP4x. AGP 2x, 4x and AGP Pro all use a 32 bit bus. When quad pumped, that amounts
to 1056Mbps, 528Mbps when dual pumped.
A large number of Intel's customers is expected to also announce support for the i840 come Monday. © |
