Santa Clara (CA) - Intel has announced two new motherboard chips that sport a faster 1333 MHz front-side bus. The P35 and G33 Express chips will support Intel’s Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors and will have upgraded integrated graphics and audio chips.

The P35 is a successor to Intel’s P965 chipset and is aimed at the mainstream customer. The chipset will support DDR3 memory for a memory bandwidth of up to 8.5 GB/sec. It will also have a PCI Express X16 slot and integrated high-definition audio and Gigabit Ethernet. Motherboard makers can add optional support for Intel’s flash-based Turbo Memory.

The G33 Express chipset is also aimed at mainstream customers and is virtually identical to the P35 except for the integrated video chip. Intel’s new 3100 graphics chip with their "Clear Video" technology will be included on the motherboards.

There are few applications that currently take advantage of DDR3 memory’s higher bandwidth, but Intel is hoping software makers step up to the plate. Intel says that DDR3 is specced for 1600 MHz speeds on the new chipsets and hope that those speeds will eventually scale up to 2133 MHz. In addition to speed, the company is also touting a greater than 25% power savings with DDR3 versus DDR2 memory.