Bij Tom's Hardware Guide is een uitgebreide preview te vinden van de Intel Solano chipset (i815). Deze chipset moet eindelijk een waardige opvolger worden voor de 440BX chipset, waar de i820 jammerlijk faalde (zie alle MTH rotzooi). Over de specs heeft Tom het volgende te zeggen:
Basically, i815 is a beefed up 'BX133' for the new millennium with 'optionally' integrated 3D. Its most important spec is of course the support of PC133 SDRAM. Now this is no half-hearted SDRAM support as found in i820/i840, but real native SDRAM support. "RDRAM - no thanks!" is the motto of i815 and it's a pleasure to realize that. As opposed to VIA, Intel knows how to make signal paths short. Therefore i815 clocks its SDRAM synchronously to the front side bus of the CPU. There might be no chance to use PC100 SDRAM with a Pentium III for 133 MHz FSB and you will also not be able to run your SDRAM at PC133-spec after plugging a Celeron into your Solano-board, but the lack of 'asynchronous memory timing' saves gates that would only cost performance and Intel would tell you that it offers other platforms (440BX/ZX, i810) for processors with 66 or 100 MHz FSB anyway. [break]De (voorlopige) conclusie luidt:[/break]There's no doubt, our early i815-sample shows that this chipset will most likely be what i820 should have been. Although the early stage of the Solano-platform could not quite fulfill all of our expectations, it is showing that Intel is on the right track. We expected BX133-performance and that's what Solano should give us at least. Nevertheless, even our beta-Solano was already able to beat i820 in most of the consumer benchmarks. This should be proof enough that i820 and its RDRAM-support are absolutely obsolete in the consumer performance segment. Even i840 will have a hard time against Solano and that should finally raise the question for the basic justification of RDRAM altogether.
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Als er een concurrent - neem AMD bijvoorbeeld - een produkt uitbrengt dat technisch vooruitstrevender is als wat er te koop is bij Intel - bijvoorbeeld de Athlon vs. de PIII - dan is dat toch echt niet dankzij die enorme R&D inspanning van Intel. 