Intel Plans A Common Socket For Xeon, Itanium

stonedonkey writes "According to EE Times, Intel is planning a common system platform for the Xeon and Itanium by 2007, "creating a unified 64-bit motherboard with a new, one-size-fits-all socket." Intel's Jason Waxman says , "It has been something that customers have been asking us for for a while now...the reseller [currently] has to have an inventory of both boxes on hand." Feeling the heat from the competition, cutting losses, or just friendly customer service?"

None of the above

[aka-ed]

Feeling the heat from the competition, cutting losses, or just friendly customer service?"

I'd say, gearing down to a commodotized market.

Uhhhhhh...

[Ayanami Rei]

Dude, Intel's got it's own OpenFirmware like doohickey already for the Itanium, it's called EFI.

Anyway, it's really simple. The processors will assert different "core-type" lines, which will control which ROM is memory-mapped to the default EIP pointer at boot time. I mean, Intel processors already signal their allowed clocking speeds by pins right now. Hell, they're probably different in x86-32 and Itanium, so they could both "be active" all the time, jumping to the appropriate memory-mapped physical address (both of which would be mapped at power-on to their own ROMs) and there'd be no need for an option line.

Re:Common socket, gmpf!

[MojoStan]

Of course to top it all off Intel claims that all of its bus technology is "proprietary", this is why nVidia hasn't made an nForce chipset for the P4 yet. AMD on the other hand has a much more open policy and actively encourages 3rd party motherboard and chipset makers. A policy which has worked very well for AMD to date.

Intel's NetBurst bus may be proprietary, but I don't think that's the reason NVIDIA hasn't made a chipset yet for the Pentium 4. Intel has licensed the bus to other 3rd party chipset makers like ATI, SiS, VIA, and ALi and they have all been shipping P4 chipsets for some time.

Here are some current examples:
ATI RADEON 9100 PRO IGP [ati.com]
SiS SiS648FX [sis.com]
VIA PT800 [via.com.tw]
ALi M1681 [ali.com.tw]

I don't know why NVIDIA doesn't make nForce chipsets for the P4. Maybe NVIDIA doesn't want to compete with Intel in making chipsets

Re:Interesting approach....

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the socket 754 is using a 32bit memory bus...

Bla... S754 uses a 64-bit memory bus. S940 (Opteron) and S939 uses a dual-channel 64-bit bus, in effect a 128-bit bus.

VIA was / is being sued by Intel

[charnov]

VIA has had several lawsuits going with Intel over their P4 chipsets. VIA says it has a license from when it bought S3 (the video card company) and Intel says, no, hence the lawsuits. Also, Intel used to make most of its own motherboards and chipsets up until the PIII when they started licensing. The Taiwanese chewed them up on chipset and motherboard business and generally ignored the scope and letter of the licensing agreements. When Intel went with the P4, they really clamped down on the license.