The Intel 440BX (codenamed Seattle), is a chipset from Intel, supporting Pentium II, Pentium III, and Celeron processors. It is also known as the i440BX and was released in April 1998. The official part number is 82443BX.

Features [link]

Intel 82443BX (440BX northbridge) on an Abit BF6

The 440BX originally supported Slot 1 and later Socket 370 Intel P6-based processors in single and SMP configurations at speeds of up to 1 GHz (and potentially up to 1.4 GHz with certain unsupported modifications, up to 1.7GHz can be achieved using Front Side Bus speeds higher than 133 and appropriate cooling). Its southbridge counterpart is the PIIX4E.

History and rise to fame [link]

The Intel 440BX is the third Pentium II chipset released by Intel, succeeding the 440FX and 440LX. With the new 100 MHz front side bus, Pentium II CPUs were able to scale better in performance by reducing the difference between processor clock and bus speed. The previous 66 MHz bus had become a serious bottleneck and dated back to the first Pentium "Classic" chipsets.

The 440BX had two closely related chipset peers; the 440ZX and 440MX. 440MX is a mobile chipset for laptops, although a number of notebooks did use 440BX. 440ZX is a cost-reduced version of 440BX. It has a lower maximum RAM limit resulting from having support for only 2 RAM banks. The 440ZX-66, designed for Intel Celeron processor, is limited to 66 MHz FSB speed.^[1]

The 440BX became one of Intel's most popular chipsets. Enthusiasts enjoyed its overclockability, with the chipset capable of running the front-side bus at speeds ranging from 66 MHz to well over 133 MHz, in stark contrast to the 440LX's struggle to top 75 MHz. A common overclock involved the pin-40 hack, or using an ABIT BH6 or Asus P2B, and setting the bus speed on a 66 MHz Covington or Mendocino-core Celeron to 100 MHz. The Mendocino-core Celeron 300A became a "sweet spot" for overclockers, with nearly 100% success rates at reaching 450 MHz on a 100 MHz FSB, allowing it to equate to a much more expensive Pentium II at 450 MHz. Other popular overclocks included the SL2W8-stepping Deschutes-core Pentium II that could often run to 450 MHz at 100 MHz FSB, and the SL35D Katmai-core Pentium III 450 MHz which could frequently manage 600 MHz on a 133 MHz FSB. The later Pentium III Coppermine-core processor was easily overclocked and performed well on 440BX motherboards. Finally, the unsupported Tualatin-core Pentium III could be used with an adapter and various modifications, with varying degrees of success.

Ironically, the 440BX offered better performance than several of its successors. The i810 and i820 chipsets were unable to beat the 440BX at the 100 MHz FSB speed. The i820 was plagued with a requirement for high cost RDRAM to reach good performance, along with a string of reliability issues involving an SDRAM-to-RDRAM memory translator hub. And, unofficially, the 440BX could often be taken to 133 MHz FSB. Enthusiast motherboards, such as the Asus P3B-F and Abit BH6/BF6/BE6 series, were equipped with BIOS options to set the board to this unofficial speed. With a 133 MHz FSB, the 440BX could even match the later i815 chipset, which was designed to accommodate the final Tualatin-core Pentium III.

Unfortunately, running a 440BX above 100 MHz FSB resulted in the AGP video card being forced to run on an overclocked AGP bus, as the 440BX only had "2/3" and "1/1" bus dividers. Some video cards were tolerant of this, such as various early NVIDIA GeForce cards, but more than a few were unstable with a 35% AGP overclock.^[2] The PCI bus was not affected by this problem (there was a "1/4" bus divider for the PCI bus on the 440BX) so users could use a PCI graphics card in lieu of an AGP one. However, this inflicted a performance penalty on graphical performance since PCI has significantly lower bandwidth throughput than AGP.

Still, the later i815 was considered the best Pentium III chipset because it offered a better feature set and very similar performance relative to the 440BX. Not only did the i815 support a proper "1/2" AGP divider for the 133 MHz FSB clock rate, AGP 4x, and Ultra DMA 100, but the later revisions also directly supported the Tualatin Pentium III.

The success of the 440BX chipset has caused various software emulation and virtualization packages to use it as part of their virtual system. VMware and Microsoft Virtual PC present the Intel 440BX chipset virtually to hosted virtual machines, due to its broad compatibility.

References [link]

External links [link]

https://wn.com/Intel_440BX

Intel

Coordinates: 37°23′16.54″N 121°57′48.74″W / 37.3879278°N 121.9635389°W / 37.3879278; -121.9635389

Intel Corporation (better known as Intel) is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Intel is one of the world's largest and highest valued semiconductor chip makers, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Intel supplies processors for computer system manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, HP and Dell. Intel also makes motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing.

Intel Corporation was founded on July 18, 1968 by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore and widely associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove, Intel combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing capability.

Intel (disambiguation)

Intel, short for Intel Corporation, is the world's largest semiconductor company.

Intel may also refer to:

Intelligence (information gathering)

Intel, a fictional cartel in the 1961/2 BBC TV science fiction serials A for Andromeda and The Andromeda Breakthrough

Intel 80188

The Intel 80188 microprocessor was a variant of the Intel 80186. The 80188 had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 80186; this made it less expensive to connect to peripherals. The 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however. It had a throughput of 1 million instructions per second.

Description

Features and performance

The 80188 series was generally intended for embedded systems, as microcontrollers with external memory. Therefore, to reduce the number of chips required, it included features such as clock generator, interrupt controller, timers, wait state generator, DMA channels, and external chip select lines. While the N80188 was compatible with the 8087 numerics co-processor, the 80C188 was not. It didn't have the ESC control codes integrated.

The initial clock rate of the 80188 was 6 MHz, but due to more hardware available for the microcode to use, especially for address calculation, many individual instructions ran faster than on an 8086 at the same clock frequency. For instance, the common register+immediateaddressing mode was significantly faster than on the 8086, especially when a memory location was both (one of the) operand(s) and the destination. Multiply and divide also showed great improvement, being several times as fast as on the original 8086 and multi-bit shifts were done almost four times as quickly as in the 8086.

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