A Year Ago Today: Intel puts MMX, Ultra DMA, AGP into chipsets

Intel will next year scale its chipsets to keep up with the demands of multimedia and the Internet, according to sources.

As exclusively revealed in PCDN last month, the chip giant will release a new chipset called the 440TX for MMX and vanilla Pentium processors early in 1997, to replace today's 430VX in mainstream desktops. It will follow up later in the year with the 440LX, a high-end chipset for the MMX Pentium Pro processor, code-named Klamath, aimed at servers and workstations.

Both chipsets support the fledgling Ultra DMA/33 hard drive protocol, which supports 33Mbps transfers, making them ideal for fast network and Internet transmissions. The 440TX will support 132Mbps data transfer rates while the 440LX supports up to 532Mbps.

The TX supports power management, Universal Serial Bus (USB), concurrent PCI, and both synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) and EDO RAM. The LX is targeted at servers and high-end desktops and will be the first chipset to support Intel's Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP), intended to become a standard means of speeding graphics by bypassing the PCI bus.