Intel’s “Bearlake” chipset has some interesting surprises.
DailyTech has received a new Intel roadmap that outlines more details on Intel’s upcoming Bearlake chipset family, which is the successor to the recently released Broadwater 96x chipset family. Intel’s Bearlake will arrive in four variants that will ship in Q2’07 and Q3’07. The first two variants to ship in Q2’07 will be the regular Bearlake-G and Bearlake-P variants. Not many details are mentioned on these vanilla Bearlake products except support for 1333 MHz FSB and Intel Clear Video Technology for the Bearlake-G variant.
Q3’07 will bring two new Bearlake variants—Bearlake-X and Bearlake-G+. Bearlake-X will replace the current 975X Express which has been carried over from the previous generation. It sports two full-speed PCI Express x16 slots for dual-graphics capabilities, though there’s no mention if ATI’s CrossFire or NVIDIA’s SLI technologies are supported. There will also be support for quad-core processors too. Bearlake-X will only support DDR3 1333 MHz memory only, a feature Bearlake-G and Bearlake-P variants lack.
Bearlake-G+ will have greater graphics processing power than Bearlake-G. The integrated graphics core will be DirectX 10 compliant and have support for Intel’s Clear Video Technology. There’s also built in support for HDCP for high definition video playback. Bearlake-G+ chipsets will support DDR2-800 or DDR3-1066 memory and 1333 MHz front-side bus processors. There doesn’t seem to be any mention of quad-core processor support though.
There’s no mention as to why the DDR3 touting Bearlake-X and Bearlake-G+ will arrive a quarter after the DDR2 supporting Bearlake-G and Bearlake-P variants, though it could be possible that Intel wants greater channel availability of DDR3. Company guidance claims less than 10% of desktop chipset sales in Q2’07 will be from Bearlake.
News source: DAILYTECH
