Intel's P55 chipset brings Nehalem into the mainstream

Taipei chronicles: vendors' hopes and grumbles for Intel's Core i5.

Visiting Taipei regularly has its advantages. After listening to our questions over the years, by now the vendors automatically bring out their new stuff without prodding. This was the case with the mainboard update a few days ago, as the hit news this month is the upcoming Intel P55 platform for the LGA1156 socket Core i7 / i5 / i3 processors, which are all of Intel's mainstream Nehalem and Westmere offerings for the next year.

The motherboard vendors, from Asus and Gigabyte to DFI and MSI, are all excited about the new platform, although design-wise it is far simpler than the previous ones. Instead of a dual-chip North and South bridge combo for Core 2, or IOH and ICH in the X58 for Core i7, there's now just a single chipset IC connected via the DMI flavour of PCIe, as most of the North Bridge functionality is now in the CPU, and that will include graphics in the Core i3 or whatever Intel decides to call the GPU-enabled 32nm Westmere dual-core CPU in a few months.

So, no more QPI or FSB overclocks or other fancy CPU to chipset link speedups for the enthusiasts. Memory is back to two channels, and yes you will see some really low-power wonders there like the GEIL 1.3 v DIMMs we reviewed here just the other day. Others, like A-Data, will try to sell very high-end DDR3-2200 capable parts there, although I think that may be better suited for the 3-channel X58 Extreme parts. And, while most of the new CPUs for the P55 platform are multiplier-locked non-Extreme parts, the up to four level Turbo auto boost on multiple cores will give a bit more excitement here. Buying a, say, 2.93GHz CPU that in most cases will work at up to 3.2GHz with all cores or 3.46GHz with one or two, doesn't sound bad, especially since the user won't need to do anything to make it happen.

Unfortunately, behind that veil of excitement, most vendors showed concerns too, differentiation from each other being the obvious one. It's pretty hard to add much more unique functionality, as the LGA1156 CPU with the P55 - and later, P57 - chipset integrate almost everything, even all the I/O interfaces and digital display outputs for the future integrated CPU graphics. The reduced number of PCIe lanes not only doesn't allow 2 x 16 PCIe SLI or Xfire, but also doesn't have enough extra lanes to mount sophisticated multilane storage, SSD or network controllers. All that has to go back to the X58 chipset, since after all, this is a mainstream chipset.

Then, we have the "Braidwood" or, in simple terms, that cute little ONFI Flash DIMM slot, which we mentioned here for the first time nearly two years ago. Well, we actually don't have it yet, as Intel disabled it at the end in the P55, leaving it for the P57 early next year. Reasons? Well, on the fly OS caching in flash isn't exactly done 'in a flash'. Intel managers in charge told me that on-the-fly OS caching, especially continued write transaction reliability, and of course OS stability - for Windows of any kind, that's never a given - have to be absolutely okay first.