Computex 2000 Coverage Day 3: More Motherboards

In the upper right of the above picture we have a regular PGA370 CPU Socket. It is overlapping a larger albeit different version of the socket called PGA370S, or Socket-370S. As you can see by the yellow circled areas, the pinout on the two sockets is obviously different which basically prevents Socket-370 CPUs from fitting into the 370S connector and vise versa. So what then fits into the PGA370S socket?

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Intel's upcoming Timna of course. For those of you that aren't familiar with the Timna design let's take a look at our explanation from our Spring IDF 2000 Coverage:

The Timna is the first chip that boasts a technology Intel coined as Smart Integration. The Timna will be Intel’s sub-$600 flagship CPU made possible because of this Smart Integration technology.

Smart Integration essentially takes the memory controller and the graphics controller and moves them off of the motherboard and actually integrates them onto the CPU. This will definitely be a poor gaming solution compared to the dedicated 3D graphics accelerator solutions that will be available around the release of the Timna, but for the entry level market the Timna should be quite successful.

As you can tell by the above picture there is no North Bridge or Graphics/Memory Controller Hub on the motherboard because those functions are integrated into the CPU itself. The orange heatsink is actually covering up a memory translator hub which is used to extend SDRAM support to the RDRAM native Timna platform, however the actual shipping version of the GA-6TMM7 as well as other Timna boards will most likely not feature an MTH and will simply be RDRAM-only solutions.