Intel Introduces i845 Chipset (officially)

We've known about Intel's i845 chipset (formerly known as 'Brookdale') forever. In fact, Tom reviewed it back in July . The main thing that's important about this announcement is that it opens the floodgates for motherboard vendors who have be sitting on their supplies of boards based on this chipset, which can make use of PC133 SDRAM. Here's Intel's laundry list of features. The Intel 845 chipset consists of two controller hubs connected to each other through Intel's hub architecture. The 82845 memory controller hub (MCH) supports a 400 MHz system bus delivering a high-bandwidth connection between the Pentium 4 processor and the rest of the platform, providing three times the system bus bandwidth over platforms based on Intel Pentium III processors. Also included in the MCH are wider data paths, a write cache, flexible memory refresh technology, and graphics devices through the 1.5V AGP4x interface enabling 1 GB/s of graphics bandwidth. The 82801BA I/O controller hub (ICH2) delivers among memory, graphics, and the I/O peripherals by making a high-bandwidth connection through the Intel hub architecture. The ICH2 provides two USB controllers enabling support for up to four USB ports. The AC97 implementation delivers six channels of audio. Integrated networking is also included, along with dual ultra ATA/100 controllers. Intel also announced the Intel application accelerator software package which it says will increase storage subsystem performance, stability and usability delivering faster hard disk I/O transfer rates and enabling faster O/S load time. The Intel application accelerator also provides support for hard disk drives greater than 137 GB.

One of the reasons that Intel may have been asking mobo makers to hold back their wares is that the company is also releasing its very own i845-based motherboards in parallel to the chipset announcement: the ATX form factor D845WN and the micro-ATX form factor D845HV (nothing like competing with your partners). In 1,000-unit quantities, the Intel 845 Chipset is priced at $42.