Rumour control: Nehalem X58 chipset revealed

Posted at: 11:35am 12th May 2008 by James Morris

Leaked roadmap and motherboard photos show Intel’s next-gen architecture is bang on time

As we recently reported, Intel’s P45 will be the last LGA775 chipset. Now further evidence has emerged that the four-year-old socket will be receiving its final payslip when P45’s successor arrives. According to Chinese news site Expreview, in the last quarter of 2008, Intel will be launching its first chipset for the brand new Nehalem processor architecture, and it will be called X58.

Nehalem will be a big technological leap forward. While Intel’s Core 2 CPUs have outperformed AMD’s recent Phenoms, in terms of design, Intel’s chips are far more traditional than its rivals, still requiring a discrete memory controller and using a Front Side Bus link to the memory. With its Opteron and Athlon 64 design, AMD brought the memory controller onto the CPU die, and replaced the Front Side Bus with HyperTransport. When Nehalem and its Bloomfield desktop variant arrive, Intel will be doing virtually the same thing.

The Nehalem microarchitecture will bring the memory controller on die as well, and will switch to a new bus called QuickPath Interconnect (formerly known as the Common System Interface). Triple-channel DDR3 will also make its debut with the X58 chipset, and some versions will integrate graphics on-die as well. To accommodate the greater variety of communications between the processor and motherboard, the desktop socket will almost double in pin count to LGA1366, although smaller sockets are also planned in 2009. The server variant of Nehalem is also expected to offer twice as many QPI buses and quad-channel memory, so will move to an even larger LGA1567 socket.

Expreview also has a sneak preview picture of a motherboard purported to be based on X58. It appears to lack the Northbridge found on all previous Intel-based boards, with no large chip near the CPU sporting heavy-duty active cooling. A smaller, more humbly cooled chip behind the expansion slots is likely to be the ICH10/R Southbridge.

So it appears that Nehalem is on track for the expected launch at the end of 2008. With the Bloomfield desktop version promising native quad-core and the return of Hyper-Threading for eight virtual cores, Christmas 2008 is shaping up to be a festival of very good cheer for computing enthusiasts.

Via Expreview.