Intel Corp launched the third generation of its building block chip sets for Pentium with the 82430FX Peripheral Component Interconnect four-chip set, which it claims runs Windows applications benchmarks up to 30% faster than its predecessor and other chip sets on the market. Also called the Triton, it offers PCI bus mastering for the IDE disk interface, a Plug ‘n’ Play port for AT peripherals and 100M-bytes per second PCI data streaming. It is designed for use with the 75MHz, 90MHz and 100MHz parts and the planned 120MHz and 150MHz Pentiums. The four chips are the Triton System Component, two Triton Data Paths and the PCI ISA/IDE Accelerator. The System Component and the Data Paths comprise a host-PCI bridge that provides a 64-bit host bus inter face, a 32-bit PCI interface, a 64-bit main memory interface, a write-back second-level cache interface, a host and PCI address decoder, and a PCI bus arbiter. The fourth chip provides the bridge between the PCI bus and the AT expansion bus and also serves as the PCI Bus Master IDE controller to reduce CPU utilisation to under 1% from 20%. Memory support goes from 4Mb to 128Mb – yep, personal computers will soon have 128Mb of main memory, and supports both 3.3V or 5V memory chips. Triton also supports 256Kb or 512Kb of write-back Level Two cache using either pipelined burst, burst or standard static RAMs. Samples of the 82430FX PCIset are available now with volume set for this month. The set costs $41.95 for 10,000-up.
