Introduction

Intel has been in a somewhat sticky situation since last September, when AMD unveiled its Athlon 64 processor to enthusiastic gamers. By integrating a memory controller, adding plenty of cache, and implementing the HyperTransport bus, AMD’s flagship was able to usurp Intel’s performance lead in a majority of game benchmarks. That lead persists in the face of AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-53 and its new Socket 939 interface.

Undaunted, Intel completed development of its 90nm lithography process and unveiled the 3.2GHz Prescott core early in February. It didn’t do well, but promises of even higher clock frequencies and excellent scaling characteristics kept us anticipating better benchmark results in future iterations of the architecture.

Pentium 4 processor

Now, after months of waiting for Alderwood and Grantsdale, the two chipsets expected to enable PCI Express connectivity, Intel is introducing its latest platforms, complementary processors, and a slew of new technologies that augment a number of important subsystems.

Intel 925X

The principle component of the new 925X chipset is Intel’s 82925X memory controller hub, which facilitates communication between processor, system memory, graphics, and peripheral subsystems. At least for now, the 925X still supports an 800MHz front-side bus and corresponding Pentium 4 processors. Purportedly, 1,066MHz bus speeds will emerge later this year.

The 925X chipset diagram

The 915G chipset diagram

Most notably, the 925X features a 16-lane PCI Express interface for graphics, offering up to 8GB per second, full-duplex of bandwidth. PCI Express isn’t backwards-compatible with AGP, so in moving to the 925X platform, Intel is necessitating compliant graphics hardware. If you remember back to when AGP first debuted, it didn’t make any groundbreaking advances with regard to performance, but the interface’s gradual evolution improved dedicated bandwidth to graphics controllers. Similarly, PCI Express shouldn’t be expected to immediately enhance gaming. It will make its mark architecturally, though, and to accelerate the process, Intel has removed AGP support from its 925X chipset.

PCI Express x16, PCI, and PCI Express x1