At the IDF Intel disclosed some details of another new chipset aka Granite Bay. This chipset is intended to replace i850/i850E in the Low-End Workstations sector. Its major peculiarity should become the support of two DDR SDRAM channels. Granite Bay is expected to come out in the end of the year.

The MCH North Bridge of this chipset will support Socket478 Pentium 4 CPUs working with 400MHz or 533MHz FSB. Also the chipset will support AGP 8x bus. The memory subsystem will comprise two DDR SDRAM channels, each of which is capable of supporting 2 DDR DIMM slots working with PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM. This way, the maximum size of the memory supported by Granite Bay makes 4GB. As for DDR333, it is unlikely to be supported by Granite Bay. At least Intel hasn’t yet expressed any desire to implement the support for this memory type.

MCH in Granite Bay will feature a 1077-pin FCBGA package and will support two hub-interfaces: with 266MB/sec bandwidth (for ICH4 South Bridge with USB 2.0 support) and 533MB/sec bandwidth (for P64H2 Bridges used in i7500 and implementing PCI-X and PCI-64 buses).