Partners for Prescott, Part 1: Intel's new 915 and 925 chipsets introduce PCI-Express to the Pentium 4
Intel's New 900-Series Chipsets Introduce PCI-Express and Much More to the Pentium 4
Introduction
Prescott is Intel's newest Pentium 4 processor design. As I discuss in my article "Enter Prescott", Prescott represents a major redesign of the Pentium 4, designed to increase the ability of the Pentium 4 to run at ever-faster clock speeds.
Faster processor clock speeds alone are not sufficient to provide a significant overall boost in performance. To enable computers to provide performance in line with what future Prescott-core processors will produce, Intel has introduced two new chipsets which are designed to maximize overall system performance with Prescott. Previously known as Canterwood and Grantdale, these new chipsets are now officially known as the 925 (Canterwood) and the 915 (Grantsdale)chipset families. In this article, you learn what new features these chipsets offer and how they differ from Intel's previous 848/865/875 chipset families. In Part 2 of this series, you discover the specific features of each chipset.