Intel 815 Chipset Review

The story of Intel chipsets for P6 CPUs is extremely instructive. Starting from i440FX, the first chipset announced simultaneously with Pentium Pro, and up to the victorious i440BX, Intel had never had any problems with the public acknowledgement of its new products and the market welcomed each of them with arms wide stretched. AGP, 100MHz FSB, PC100 SDRAM - Intel kept adding new stuff to its products little by little. However, one of Intel's last chipsets for high performance systems suffered a total fiasco. Trying to influence the market and to make the users turn to RDRAM for their desktop PCs, Intel stumbled. Neither the manufacturers, nor the users were ready for drastic changes like that, which were moreover connected with quite tangible spendings, because SDRAM and RDRAM cost differed by nearly 3-5 times. Besides, Intel failed to launch its i820 in time and the supplies of this notorious chipset were postponed now and then.

So, the things with the chipsets stood not in the best way for Intel. Cheap i810 and i810E equipped with the integrated graphics core and aimed at Low-End market sector immediately turned out much more popular, than the mainstream i820 because they supported SDRAM. And since Intel's positions here appeared pretty weakened, VIA took advantage of the situation and started winning more and more popularity and users' trust due to its successful Apollo Pro133 and Apollo Pro133A.

In this case Intel couldn't but indulge the users' desires and provide i820 with SDRAM support. However, adding SDRAM support couldn't be carried out that easily. So, the maximum Intel could think of, was to add another microchip, which would be responsible for interaction between i820 and SDRAM, namely for the interaction between SDRAM and RDRAM. As a result, this combination of absolutely different architectures led to extreme performance worsening of the entire system and its awful instability, so that Intel had to call back this unsuccessful solution. So this attempt of i820 to meet the customers' requirements ended up in failure.

Watching the ordeals of its newly born baby it suddenly occurred to Intel that the world needed another chipset supporting SDRAM, namely, its latest modification - PC133 SDRAM. Unfortunately, i440BX, which kept rendering obedience, started getting morally outdated, because it was unable to support the whole bunch of modern features, such as AGP 4x, PC133 SDRAM, UltraDMA/66 and the most significant drawback: it didn't support 133MHz FSB.