Intel Bearlake will be the chipset to replace the current chipsets and by the looks of it we will have to wait until the third quarter to see it, but then it will bring support for the new DDR3 memory technology. Bearlake will be available in a variety of flavors, just like current Intel chipsets and one of them will be Intel P35, the successor to today’s Intel P965 chipset. At TweakTown they’ve managed to get a hold of an early engineering sample of Intel’s P35 motherboard and they’ve now published a preview of Intel’s coming chipset. The updated memory controller is one of the biggest news and for obvious reasons they had to settle for testing the DDR2 technology.
For being an early preproduction sample the Intel P35 chipset handled really well and managed to whip the P965 circuit in most benchmarks, but with quite small margins. Unfortunately there are no quad-core tests, which is where Bearlake will really show its strength according to Intel. In the end though, things are looking very promising and we’re looking forward to a third quarter launch.
