X58 chipset for Bloomfield may get ‘physics engine’

The desktop version of the Nehalem processor, Bloomfield, will work with the X58 chipset. The new chipset includes support for four video cards and may contain hardware for physics calculations.

The X58 is connected to the quad-core Bloomfield CPU via a Quickpath link, Intel’s answer to AMD’s Hypertransport. This should provide two to three times the bandwidth of the FSB of current Core 2 Quad processors. The chipset first known as ‘Tylersburg’ offers enough PCI-e channels for two video cards in a PCIe-x16 setup or even four video cards in a PCI-e-x8 configuration. Interesting about the leaked slide is that spoken talks about physics engine scaling that would indicate that hardware for physics calculations is built into the X58 chipset. This would then be the first result of the acquisition of physics middleware developer Havok in September 2007.

The leaked presentation also mentions the fact that the three DDR3 channels with an effective clock speed of 1333MHz should provide a maximum bandwidth of 32GB/s. The current X48 chipset with support for two DDR3 channels at 1600MHz offers a bandwidth cap of 25.6GB/s. As with AMD’s current Barcelona and Phenom chips, the Bloomfield has a built-in memory controller, while 8MB of L3 cache should keep the factory running smoothly.