Rumour control: P45 will be last LGA775 chipset

Posted at: 11:12am 2nd May 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Leading motherboard manufacturer says that P45 will be the most important chipset for motherboard manufacturers for a long time

Crossing the bridge between NetBurst’s swansong chips and several generations of Core 2, the LGA775 socket has had a good innings. However,t the word is that Intel’s forthcoming P45 chipset will be the last chipset to support the socket.

This won’t be a huge surprise to those of you who’ve seen the leaked pictures of Intel’s forthcoming Nehalem CPUs, but an anonymous source at a leading motherboard manufacturer told Custom PC that Intel’s shift to a new socket is likely to make P45 a very popular chipset.

‘The P45 Chipset is so important for motherboard manufacturers,’ they said, as ‘it’s probably the last LGA775 Intel chipset.’ According to our source, this means that the chipset will have a very long lifespan, with a huge share of the chipset market. Our source also said that, as a result, the company was putting more effort into the design, BIOS and components of its new P45 board than with any previous boards for a long time.

Although it was originally ridiculed for swapping CPU pins for pads, Intel’s LGA775 socket has had a remarkable lifespan of several years, especially when you consider that AMD has gone from Socket 939, through AM2 and now AM2+ in a similar timeframe.