Digital Home Thoughts: Intel Launches Next Generation PC Platform

"Intel has decided to launch a completely new PC platform. [Last week's] launch will impact the way PCs work for the foreseeable future with a wide range of new technologies that will, over time replace many of the things we’re used to seeing in a PC ... As well as the implementation of PCI Express, Intel has also seen it fit to change the CPU socket and memory in one fell swoop. The new CPU socket is known as Socket-T and the new processors will be of LGA775 type. LGA stands for Land Grid Array and means that there are no pins on the bottom of the CPU, although there are still contact surfaces - no less 775 of them."



Apparently, the new design has caused the CPU interface to be moved to the motherboard socket since the problem of broken or bent pins was a big one for Intel and with this change, the onus for dealing with annoyed customers will presumably fall on the motherboard manufacturers. There are several other implications of this new design in terms of number of times you can move your processor, performance, CPU cooling and shock absorption, all of which are discussed in this review.

Intel also announced its support for DDR2 (interestingly AMD is sticking with DDR400). This review also sees that Intel motherboards (the one examined here is the 925XCV) are now coming with PCI-E slots, USB 2.0, RAID and SATA support. Good stuff, will go well with my Maxtor 300GB 16MB cache SATA drive, which is actually the drive used in this review.