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On the I/O interface level, the Granite Bay features the same 82801DB I/O Controller Hub (ICH-4) solution as any other modern Intel chipset. Key features are the integrated ATA /100 IDE interface, support for USB 2.0 and 32 bit interfacing for Gigabit Ethernet. AC'97 sound with 6 channel Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound is currently industry standard and supported by most audio CODICES.

E7250 and ICH4

With all this dual channel goodness on the chipset level, where are the boards featuring the Granite Bay? Quite a few manufacturers have announced their boards, some of them have revealed production figures, e.g. Soltek who will produce a whopping 700 units, 200 of which will feature onboard RAID, the rest will be plain vanilla. Other manufacturers as well have announced a handful of boards only. There is a good very good reason for the limited quantity, though, and that reason is that the E7205 as a chipset is targeted towards the workstation market however, it is being pushed into the enthusiast market by the mainboard vendors. Early in 2003, there will be a desktop version of a dual channel DDR board (Springdale) supporting both DDR333 and 400 and that, of course will make Granite Bay-based enthusiast boards obsolete in both performance and production cost.

The latter point means that the E7205 is not exactly a budget chipset and all mainboard manufacturers will have to scrape their bellies just in order to break even to offer a Granite Bay board in the enthusiast market at a reasonable price. Exacerbating in this situation is that both the E7205 "Granite Bay" and the E7505 "Placer" chipsets are plagued by a few bugs in form of some signal timing issues that don't meet the AGP 3.0 specifications, specifically, the tVAL_min or data valid window skew meaning that the data arrive and expire too early. This can be remedied by adjusting the trace length on the mainboard level.

Another issue concerns the AGP prefetch cache; this problem can be remedied by means of a "BIOS workaround" meaning that the cache is simply turned off. While this sounds like a more serious flaw, it appears as if it would affect mostly AGP 2.0 compliant cards. That is, using the split transaction protocol specified in the AGP 3.0 definitions (removal of support for Long Transactions) along with the exclusive SBA addressing scheme, there is no real need for prefetch caching in AGP 3.0. Anyway, enough of industry-insider soap opera, it is time to look at a real board and this board is the ASUS P4G8X.

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