Vendors Prep New Components For Rollout

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel, for one, is readying a new board, code-named Westville, which has two onboard Gigabit Ethernet ports, said industry sources. Given that most servers are built with two NICs, that two-port design will come in handy, said white-box builders.

Motherboard vendors are enhancing the storage capabilities of their products as well.

First International Computer, Fremont, Calif., plans to ship a series of Pentium 4-based motherboards with onboard RAID connectivity for up to eight IDE hard drives. Meanwhile, Taipei, Taiwan-based ASUSTek Computer will integrate a hard-drive controller with one of its new boards, for use with Serial ATA hard drives.

For systems builders, faster processor speeds won't be as critical as onboard Serial ATA and 4X AGP graphics, said Stephen Monteros, general manager of GST/Micro City, Cerritos, Calif.

Serial ATA technology uses a four-wire connection and draws less power than IDE, and vendors are telling builders to watch for Serial ATA hard-drive samples to be ready by fall 2003, said Monteros.

New chipsets are in the works too.

Sources at motherboard vendors said Intel plans to release a chipset, code-named Springdale, that will support RAMBUS and the company's upcoming 3.08GHz processors.

In September, Intel plans to launch the 845GE, the first chipset from the vendor to support DDR memory at 333MHz and integrated 4X AGP graphics, said sources. Also this fall, Intel is expected to release the 845PE, a chipset similar to the 845GE but without the integrated graphics support.

Intel will follow the 845 series with a chipset aimed at the workstation space, said an Intel executive. That product, code-named "Granite Bay," will include support for dual-DDR memory and 8X AGP.

Taipei-based chipset vendor Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) will launch its 648 chipset, which supports 400MHz DDR memory and integrated 8X AGP graphics, said Rockson Chiang, specialist in product planning at Giga-Byte Technology, a motherboard vendor based in Taiwan.

And VIA Technologies, also in Taipei, has several new chipsets coming to market including the KT-400, which supports 400MHz DDR memory.