Chipset off the old block

New Intel silicon pushes imaginary performance envelope, reports Gemima Jobless

Hot on the heels of its P35, Intel is set to deliver a brand new chipset packed with yet more future-facing features. The forthcoming P45, codenamed ‘Duckpond’, will replace the current P35 aka ‘Bearlake’ long before users have outgrown its capabilities.

‘We called it P45 because a lot of its features will be looking for a job after its release,’ explained Intel’s PR technologist Nigella Netburst. ‘It will contain quite a few redundant capabilities, such as support for bus speeds and memory types which won’t arrive until at least 2008.’ According to Intel, this will make the P45 so far ahead of current chipsets it’s actually behind them.

The P45 chipset will support the mysterious new 1337MHz Front Side Bus, primarily aimed at gamers, and DDR-WHO memory, which can run backwards as well as forwards in time. DDR-WHO is designed to achieve much greater financial margins with no noticeable benefit for performance. This should provide a smooth transition for the consumer, without an annoying leap in memory bandwidth which can cause customer disorientation.

The P45 chipset will be backwards compatible with EDO DRAM so motherboard manufacturers have something to fall back upon until you can actually buy DDR-WHO in 2009. However, P45 won’t support any processors Intel thinks are unfashionable. In fact, at launch no current Intel processors will be compatible with P45.

A P60 chipset is also expected at the end of the year. This special anniversary chipset will contain a summary of the year’s features, and will primarily be aimed at financial benchmarking. AMD is also currently working on its next Intel-oriented chipset, the UB40. It’s codenamed ‘Red Red Whine’, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the sound people make when they hear yet another AMD product has been delayed for a year after its original launch date.