Intel has unveiled its latest chipsets, codenamed Grantsdale, which cover the mainstream and high performance sectors -- the bulk of the PC market.

The most notable feature of the 925X and 915 chipsets is the dropping of the accelerated graphics port (AGP).

The latter has been removed in favor of PCI-Express, in this case a 16-channel link to the graphics board. It can deliver up to 4GByte/sec. in both directions.

"We've moved away from AGP now," said David Hollway, technical marketing engineer at Intel.

The increased bandwidth of PCI Express -- around four times that of the latest AGP 8x interface -- will allow a PC to implement digital video recorder applications. These require multiple audio/video streams to be passed from the graphics card to the processor and hard disk.

The 915 chipset includes 3D graphics acceleration, so is aimed at the mainstream market. The Media Accelerator 900 has DirectX 9 support, said Hollway, and runs 3D benchmarks around 1.7 times faster than the graphics accelerator in the 865G chipset.

The chipsets also support high definition audio, the next step beyond AC97. "We can support typically eight concurrent input sources," said Hollway. These are at 192kHx in 24-bit form. Output can be up to 7.1 audio channels or two separate audio streams.

Motherboard support is for up to four PCI Express x1 sockets, each being 250MByte/sec. bi-directional. The front side bus runs at 800MHz, while the memory interface is for DDR2 at up to 533MHz.

Four serial ATA interfaces allow two hard disks to be run by the chipset, with the capability to run a RAID0 and RAID1 system across the two partitioned disks. Support includes native command queuing and hot swapping of drives.

By: DocMemory
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