After our today’s news-story concerning MSI 848P Neo mainboard based on Intel’s not announced i848P chipset, a reader sent us a link on Intel’s web-site where the i848P core-logic is described in details by Intel itself. It transpires that the Santa Clara, California-based corporation had simply included the novelty into its list of products without making loud announcements thus far.

As we said earlier, the i848P is a derivative from the i865 “Springdale” architecture with support for 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, only single-channel PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory, AGP8x, HyperThreading technology, Communication Streaming Architecture featuring a Dedicated Network Bus (DNB) interface for wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet and so in. Additionally, the i848P can work with the latest I/O controllers from Intel – ICH5 and ICH5R – with Serial ATA-150 and USB 2.0 support.

The 82848P Memory Controller Hub is pin-to-pin compatible with the rest i865 family of products that utilize 932 Flip Chip Ball Grid Array (FCBGA) package. In contrast, i875P MCH is packaged in 1005 Flip Chip Ball Grid Array (FCBGA) chip, while the i865PE MCH uses 593 Flip Chip Pin Grid Array (FCBGA) package. This proves that architecture of the i848P is identical to that of i865P/PE.

Obviously, Intel was in a big hurry when preparing this page on its web-site since there is a mistake in the scheme of the core-logic: its peak memory bandwidth is not 6.40GB/s, but 3.20GB/s due to absence of dual-channel memory support.

Since there are no announcements of the i848P chipset now, I expect the formal roll-out to happen sometime in future. Moreover, the i865P core-logic that was rumoured to be replaced by the i848P will also live on for another quarter or two, I believe, even though it will hardly be adopted widely.

The i848P is not likely to put much pressure on the previous generation of chipsets, dubbed i845-series, throughout a quarter from now, because it is priced at $31 (with ICH5), while the i845PE costs $23 (with ICH4); however, it will substitute the i845 family late this year or early next year when even entry-level PC segment require Serial ATA-150 and AGP 8x support.