Intel chipset roadmap emerges

The integrated version of Intel's Grantsdale chipset will tape out during the week commencing 29 September, if a development schedule posted on the web today is accurate.

Grantsdale-G has been designed for the 'Prescott' processor - the 90nm successor to the Pentium 4 - and is due to ship Q2 2004. Taping out is essentially the stage at which the chipset's design work has been completed. The next stage is to fab the thing and work on getting the bugs out of the silicon. That could easily take more than two full quarters to get right.

Springdale and Canterwood are believed to have taped out at the end of 2002, before shipping as the i865 and i875 in Q2 this year.

Design work on the Grantsdale-G won't stop there, however. The list posted on Adrian's RojakPot shows two further revisions of the chipset taping out on or after 1 December and 1 March, respectively.

Chipsets codenamed 'Alderwood' and 'Lakeport' - the latter in discrete and integrated forms - are also listed, about which little is known. Alderwood should tape out around the 13 October, with a design earmarked for production being ready on or after 23 August 2004. So it's clearly a long way off - presumably it will be used with the 'Tejas' processor, the successor to Prescott.

Lakeport-G, meanwhile, has two pre-release iterations booked, followed by a production design. The first two are set to tape out on or after 21 June 2004 and 13 September 2004, respectively. The production version should tape out on or after 7 March 2005.

That's the same production tape-out timeframe for the discrete Lakeport-P, the list claims. Its initial design is scheduled to be complete by 3 September 2004.

Alongside these parts sits 'Alviso', a mobile chipset due to go through at least three design revisions before production, on 10 November 2003, 8 December 2003 and 30 September 2004, respectively. No production date is given - or for Grantsdale-G, for that matter. However, previous reports have pegged its release at 16 August 2004.

Even assuming the dates and codenames in the list are correct, it's worth bearing in mind that such a broad schedule, stretching well into 2005, could well change in the intervening months and years. And just because a chipset has reached a certain level of completion doesn't mean Intel's marketing people will sanction its release - or even let it come to market at all.

Little is known about Lakeport or Alderwood, but Alviso appears to be designed for the 90nm 'Jonah' core, the successor to the next generation of Pentium M, 'Dothan'. It is believed to support DDR II memory and almost certainly will ship with PCI Express support - pretty much a given for future Intel chipsets. It has been said to offer a 533MHz frontside bus.

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