Thursday, March 20th 2008
Intel Bloomfield Motherboard Up Close and Personal
Intel Smackover Motherboard Up Close and Personal
As Intel's next-gen 45nm Hi-k Nehalem CPU architecture codenamed Bloomfield is being planned for the fourth quarter of this year, it's time to see some pictures of the motherboard that will become home for these new processors. The board pictured below is an early reference sample codenamed "Smackover" (see picture 1). Smackover will be released in Q4 together with the Nehalem server parts and it will be a triple-channel DDR3 high-end workstation/gaming platform. The motherboard has single 1366-pin CPU socket, four DDR3-1333 slots, three of which being colored blue to signal the triple-channel support and two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, likely bringing CrossFire to Intel's platform. The only heatsink installed is the one covering the ICH10 southbridge while the Tylersburg NB is left "naked". The board has no IDE or floppy connectors, but only six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports.
Sources:
TechConnect Magazine, Chiphell
As Intel's next-gen 45nm Hi-k Nehalem CPU architecture codenamed Bloomfield is being planned for the fourth quarter of this year, it's time to see some pictures of the motherboard that will become home for these new processors. The board pictured below is an early reference sample codenamed "Smackover" (see picture 1). Smackover will be released in Q4 together with the Nehalem server parts and it will be a triple-channel DDR3 high-end workstation/gaming platform. The motherboard has single 1366-pin CPU socket, four DDR3-1333 slots, three of which being colored blue to signal the triple-channel support and two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, likely bringing CrossFire to Intel's platform. The only heatsink installed is the one covering the ICH10 southbridge while the Tylersburg NB is left "naked". The board has no IDE or floppy connectors, but only six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports.
27 Comments on Intel Bloomfield Motherboard Up Close and Personal
^^
I wonder if the Northbridge can be passively cooled? I guess not, or it would have been installed just like the southbridge.
So will Nahelam come in TWO versions. One, like this one, with integrated memory controller, and another that is socket compatible with xeon XP?
Intel has DUMPED PATA. Oh dear, what about all those lovely second HDDs and DVD R/W drives we want to transfer over :-(
No COM port. No Parallel port. Shame. So many "enthusiasts" devices run off COM/Parallel, like EPROM/BIOS programmers, control systems, etc. Means a COM add-in board is the first upgrade this machine will need. Personally, I find a COM port more useful that TWO external SATA ports.
So much wasted space... a nice COM could fit in there!
What happens when you stick in 4 memory sticks? I wonder why they capped at three channels and didnt do the full 4 channel memory like skulltrail. Odd really, because a platform designed for VS and 8 threads is going to have a memory bottleneck. It really needs the full 4 channel.
This is even more obvious with Silverthorne. Add a few atoms to the Nahelam core and it will really demand higher memory bandwidth. Own goal not to build that in reght now. Because adding it later (with inbuilt memory controller) is probably going to need ANOTHER socket specification.
and it doest need quad channel
no its gona have no bottleneck in memmory
trichannel is new quadchannel is atm only for Server ram
and skull trail is a server board not a desktop board!
plz do some more research
EDIT: Found the 8-pin connector..n/m I was blind! :D
Can't wait to see what this new tech is capable of! :toast:
"????? joes-order the smackover special"
Wtf is that all about?
I bet it says "Eat at Joe's, order the smackover special".....some American could explain what that is.
I'd like to give my thanks to Tamas for his mail!
are there anny pics of the cpu it self? :)
The scaled down dual channel version will be the non-extreme edition, at least to begin with.