Canterwood Motherboards Refined 74
YingYang writes "With Intel's i875P (otherwise known as Canterwood) chipset launch a couple of
weeks ago, we were shown what an 800MHz System Bus can do for performance of the
Pentium 4. At the time however, there were few Taiwanese OEM motherboards out and test-beds used to showcase the new chipset and throttled-up P4, were based on Intel designed motherboards. Now however, the Canterwoods are beginning to flow out of Taiwan and vendors like
Abit and Asus have put together boards with a ton of integrated features and performance, that reminds us of the days of the 'BX,' when Intel chipsets were the only way to fly. Check out
this Abit/Asus Canterwood head to head comparison at HotHardware."
Is this worth the price? (Score:1, Interesting)
Need to create a mySQL table [webcalc.net]?
Side mount IDE connectors (Score:4, Interesting)
this is "the" ddr chip. (Score:5, Interesting)
Will Intel ever go away? (Score:3, Interesting)
watch out AMD (Score:5, Interesting)
The 3.0 GHz P4 with 200 MHz FSB and dual channel DDR400 should handily beat the Athlon XP 3200+, and it will likely be priced less initially since Intel expects to introduce a 3.2 GHz part at the same time. That part will have a large performance margin over anything AMD has or will introduce this year.
I don't think they will get this technology into the Xeons soon enough to fight off Opteron, though, or even to take the performance lead for x86 servers.
Re:Will Intel ever go away? (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel designed motherboard? (Score:5, Interesting)
Contrast this to the Intel boards, however. They were soo bloody afraid of someone running the CPU faster than the spec, that they tended to not handle the additional voltages or clock multipliers. Intel designed motherboard is not an asset in my book.
As for the chipset itself, it will be some time before it proves it's salt. I got burned badly with the i840 chipset debacle and stranded with the GX chipset. The i840 was what drove me to AMD on the workstation side.
VIA's chips (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that the issues are settled though, you can expect to see more competition from VIA's new P4 chipset that will support 800Mhz FSB CPU's.
competition (Score:5, Interesting)
One guy who got deservedly lambasted on Usenet years ago said, "I like having AMD and Cyrix around, since they keep Intel's prices down for me." AMD and Cyrix aren't in the business so others can buy Intel's chips more cheaply. For all of our innovation, we're in a really STUPID industry, because for practically its entire history, computing has simply moved from one monopoly to another. From IBM to Microsoft, and now it's apparent that Microsoft is on the wane, because Intel is emerging as the One Dominator. Only for intervals where one monopoly is falling and another rising do we have real competition. I know it's been Wintel for over a decade, but really Microsoft has been in the driver's seat. That's changing, right now.
Not just FSB performance (Score:4, Interesting)
AGP was brought around to provide faster access to the CPU/northbridge than PCI.
AMDs HyperTransport technology (which my motherboard has) widens the Bus paths between the south bridge and north bridge to 4 bits (from a 1 bit path and hypertransport can scale to 64 bit wide paths!). now all of my PCI, IDE, SATA, Onboard Audio paths are 4 bit wide capable of going at almost 800 mb/sec
This is what is going to put Intel back as the performance market leader... until that hypertransport starts getting into the 8 and 16 bit wide bus pathways....
Re:Will Intel ever go away? (Score:4, Interesting)
-the av
Re:Not just FSB performance (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Intel designed motherboard? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hello,
It's important to keep in mind that just like automobile manufacturers, motherboard manufacturers make products targeted at different markets.
Just as automobile enthusiasts [nhra.org] replace stock carburetors and transmissions with performance parts, overbore engines, modify ECUs and so forth, computer enthusiasts [hardocp.com] tweak their BIOSes, replace stock heatsinks with watercooling, use rounded cables, et cetera.
But for the overwhelming majority of automobile or computer users out there, they get by just fine on with their Fords or Chevys or Dells or Gateways. While Ferraris [ferrari.com] and Falcon Northwests [falcon-nw.com] are fast, how often is the average driver going to need to go 150MPH or get involved in a lanparty frag-fest? It's important to keep in perspective that the overwhelming majority of automobile and computer drivers perform routine tasks like driving back and forth from work, word processing, going down to the corner grocery, web surfing, and so forth. And for those types of activities, a Saturn or eMachine is going to do the job just as well as the most exotic car or PC you can imagine.
Having worked around average (read: non-computer industry) computer users long enough, I can tell you that they just don't care about what brand of CPU or type of memory their computer has, much less its CAS and RAS timings. They just want something that's inexpensive and reliable.
This is the market that Intel goes after for its motherboards. Not necessarily the end users themselves--I would imagine Intel's retail motherboard sales account for a small percentage of total motherboard sales compared to their OEM sales--but the companies who make those mass-market computers. And for those end users, that's fine. They'll probably never play a video game more challenging than Solitaire just like they'll never drive more than 120MPH. And they're more concerned about being able to get work done on their computer or getting to the dry cleaners on time to pick up the laundry then burning out a CPU or cracking an engine block.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky