Intel's X38 chipsets arrives in Q3 and it supports the new Quad and Dual 45 nanometre cores. The new high-end chipset also supports DDR3 1333, but the most interesting part for us is the PCIe 2.0 support.

The X38 chipset has two PCIe 2.0 16X ports and we wonder what Intel plans to plug into them. Today only ATI cards work in Intel motherboards, while a pair of Nvidia cards still only works with the Nforce chipset.

This might indicate that AMD's graphics card lead with R600 generation might actually work in new Intel motherboards. We don't see any reason why they shouldn't, but now we are entering the dark waters of inter-company politics.

The new chipset supports ICH9, ICH9R, ICH9DH and it should last at least till Q2 2008.