Intel On the Offensive: Roadmap Details and Analysis

Also mentioned in the roadmap were speed and feature revisions on the Celeron lineup. Aside from the extra speed boost, the new Celeron chips will also receive EM64T support.

Intel Single Core Value Desktop Lineup LGA775
Processor	Speed	L2 Cache	FSB	Launch
Celeron D 355	3.33GHz	256KB	533MHz	Q4'05
Celeron D 351	3.20GHz	256KB	533MHz	Soon
Celeron D 346	3.06GHz	256KB	533MHz	Soon
Celeron D 341	2.93GHz	256KB	533MHz	Soon
Celeron D 336	2.80GHz	256KB	533MHz	Soon
Celeron D 331	2.66GHz	256KB	533MHz	Soon
Celeron D 326	2.53GHz	256KB	533MHz	Soon

The Celeron D 351/350 will launch this month at $127 with price cuts on all Celeron and Pentium chips almost exactly a month after. Unfortunately, our crystal ball doesn't go past Celeron 3.33GHz. We would expect to see a Cedar Mill revision of Celeron, perhaps with 512KB L2 cache. The roadmaps very specifically do not show any new value processors based on 65nm at least through Q2'06. The roadmap does hint at speed bumps in Q2'06, but the exact reason why there are no 65nm value processors seems quite vague.

Desktop Chipsets

The roadmap also starts to talk about Intel's Broadwater chipset. Broadwater sounds exciting because it replaces all chipsets for Intel - from 955X all the way down. Our guess is that Broadwater will act more like nForce; different revisions will fill differing demands. Where Intel always used to speak of two differing chipsets (like Canterwood/Springdale, Alderwood/Grantsdale, Glenwood/Lakeport), even if they were nearly identical, the fact that Intel talks about a single chipset family unifying all of their desktop platforms indicates that things won't be exactly business as usual come Q2'06 during the next chipset launch. Aside from the general updates (ICH8 and next generation iAMT), the roadmaps revealed almost nothing about Broadwater.

Just before Broadwater, we will see the launch of 945GZ. G45GZ seems almost like a step back, with identical features to 915G including 800FSB and DDR2-533. However, the chipset will get an update on the integrated graphics to GMA950 and an updated Southbridge to ICH7. Oddly enough, Intel also claims that this will be a mainstream chipset, even though the FSB and DDR clocks are lower than existing 945P products. If anything, this might be just another indicator that Intel's push for 1066FSB wasn't really the solution that they had intended.

Intel has also decided to rework their motherboard SKUs and this should be evident already on the retail market. Each new Intel branded motherboard based on 945 or higher will receive one of several tags listed below:

• X - Extreme Series
• M - Media Series
• E - Executive Series
• C - Classic Series

Although the X and M are pretty self-explanatory, it looks like the E and C ratings seem a little ambiguous. Judging from Intel's website, it seems like there is a bit of overlap between some of these indicators. Intel's roadmap was also very pleased to announce that all of their current motherboards and future motherboards are lead free. There was also a bit of surprise that Intel will continue to work on new 915G designs right up until 945GZ. Either 915 is pretty comparable to 945 for value systems or Intel just has a lot of 915G chips left that they want to get rid of.