Intel Bearlake chipset, DDR3 support and dual graphics

DailyTech reports they have received a new Intel roadmap, stating more details on Intel's upcoming Bearlake chipset family, the successor to the recently released Broadwater 96x chipset family. Intel's Bearlake will arrive in four variants that will ship in Q2'07 and Q3'07. The first two variants to ship in Q2'07 will be the regular Bearlake-G and Bearlake-P variants. Not many details are mentioned on these two products except support for 1333 MHz FSB and Intel Clear Video Technology for the Bearlake-G variant with integrated graphics.

Q3'07 will bring two new Bearlake variants; Bearlake-X and Bearlake-G+. Bearlake-X will replace the current 975X Express chipset that has been carried over from the previous generation. It sports two full-speed PCI Express x16 slots for dual-graphics capabilities, though there is no mention if ATI's CrossFire or NVIDIA's SLI technologies are supported. The chipset will also support quad-core processors, PCI Express 2.0 and DDR3 1333 MHz memory.

Bearlake-G+ will have greater graphics processing power than Bearlake-G. The integrated graphics core will be DirectX 10 compliant and have support for Intel's Clear Video Technology. There is also built in support for HDMI audio and video output with HDCP compliance for high definition video playback. Bearlake-G+ chipsets will support DDR2-800 or DDR3-1066 memory and 1333 MHz front-side bus processors.

Intel's Bearlake chipset on the newly released roadmap