Upgrade paths

[nk4]

Lets say someone buys a BX motherboard today, which is the best available type, with a p3-500. what kind of upgrade path would that offer? From what I read, no BX board will be compatible with coppermine, even if they support 133Mhz bus. Would that mean that the next upgrade would require a fundamental change, practically the replacement of most of the system?
In other words is the purchase of a katmai p3 now (or a k6-3 450 for that matter) a dead end as far as upgrading goes?

[MadMax]

The only thing you might HAVE to replace w/ the cpu is the mainboard. How does that translate to "most" of the system? I don't understand what your concern is about upgradability, could you elaborate, please?

[steves]

I did hear talk of the coppermine chipset only supporting RAMBUS and not SDRAM (some problems Intel are having OR desire to force every one to buy new RAM!). I think this was mentioned on Tom's site a couple of weeks ago - and it was only mentioned as a possibility, I got the impression that Intel hadn't made the decision at that point.

Therefore if coppermine requires the new chipset it might require new RAM as well.

Oh hum. Please correct me if I heard wrong.

Can't see it being and worse than CPU+RAM+M/B.

[800XL]

From the word I hear, Intel is not making any sweeping changes to the bus architecture of coppermine or anything. I don't see any reason, other than to sell 810 (well, 8xx) chipsets that Intel would change things enough to need a new motherboard. Don't get me wrong, that is plenty of reason for Intel, but it would be hard to veil it as otherwise. It sort of reminds me of when Intel told us all that Slot 1 was FAR different from the PPro and socket 8. I know no one ever made one, but it would be fairly trivia electrically speaking to make a slot 1 CPU to socket 8 adapter that would work. Try and fit that sucker into your system though. Back to the point though. If anything I am betting that Intel will push the socket idea more and more again. Try tinkering with unlocking the multiplier on a a Socket 370 chip sometime and I think the reasons will be clear. The Slot 1 idea was to get low cost cache chips and the P6 core together. The PPro was always expensive to build because of that problem. But with new chips coming out with the cache on the die, it is no longer a factor. I'm not so sure we will see a socket 370 Coppermine, but the odds are pretty good that it will have pins on its bottom. (ouch)

[steves]

From Toms Site 14/05/99:

According to the latest roadmap, Intel will enable the Camino Boards (to be released in September) to use PC 100 SDRAM.
As the developpers face various problems with the implementation of RAMBUS due to the frequencies, Intel will allow riser cards to be plugged into the RIMM sockets. On these cards SDRAM modules can still be used.
To enable SDRAM to work on these riser cards a MTH (memory transformer hub) will be added to this adapter. There is no information on pricing so far.
The problems like availability, stability and pricing (An increase of the main memory costs RAMBUS vs SDRAM of 30 up to 50% can be expected) can be solved by stepping back via this card.