Makers tout i925, i915-based mobos ahead of Intel launch

Grantsdale and Alderwood on display

Computex Intel's 'Grantsdale' and 'Alderwood' may officially be nothing more than codenames for as-yet-unreleased product, but the chipsets were widely on display this week at Computex.

The chip giant will not formally announce the two Pentium 4-oriented parts until 21 June, but today mobos based on them both were on display at the Foxconn, Elitegroup, Gigabyte, Soltek, Soyo, and EPoX stands, and at a number of others.

And pretty much all of them were named after their chipsets: the i925X (Alderwood), and the i915P and i915G (Grantsdale).

You might think Intel would be a little unhappy about this pre-announcement product marketing - indeed, one slightly embarrassed motherboard purveyor, when asked whether Intel knew about his display, said: "Er... no..." - but all the products on show, from all the vendors, had Intel's own marketing collateral attached.

The feature-sets of Alderwood and Grantsdale are well known, but said Intel cards revealed two new brandings: Intel Matrix Storage Technology and Intel Wireless Connect. The latter is likely to be the soft access point system Intel has already said it will provide the chipsets, but MST is a new term. We understand it's what the chip giant is calling RAID, these days. Since the old i875 chipset supports RAID 0,1 and 0+1, MST must be some new take on the technology.

In addition to these two items, Alderwood and Grantsdale offer 775-pin processor support; PCI Express for graphics and other add-in cards; 800MHz and 533MHz frontside bus speeds; dual-channel DDR and DDR 2 memory; eight-channel High-Definition Audio; two Gigabit Ethernet ports; and eight USB 2.0 ports.

The i915G ships with Intel's new integrated graphics engine, now confirmed by the company's collateral as the Media Graphics Accelerator 900.

The three chipsets are expected to be formally introduced on 21 June, alongside Intel's new 775-pin Pentium 4 processors at speeds of up to 3.6GHz. ®

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