Well, it looks like we have confirmation that Intel plans to launch the G45 and G43 chipsets at Computex, as Supermicro has tipped boards that use both of them.

The board company plans to launch the C2SEA and C2SEE platforms, which use the "Eagle Lake" chipsets from Intel. Pricing and availability was not announced, however, as is often the case at Computex.

Both feature a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot for an add-in graphics card, which doubles the I/O bandwidth to 5 Gb/s from 2.5 Gb/s. Conveniently, existing PCI-E 1.1 graphics cards are fully compatible with the new PCI-E 2.0 specification.

What's the difference between the two? The C2SEA features a complete high-definition playback solution with full bit-rate support at 1080i/p resolution, an indication that the C2SEA supports decoding of the format in hardware, while the G43 does not.

In addition, the G45 supports two DDR3 memory channels with up to two DIMMs per channel, for up to 8GB of memory. The G43, apparently, supports a single two-DIMM channel. Supermicro also notes that the G43 supports four legacy 32-bit PCI slots.

Both chipsets share the following common features, according to Supermicro: high-definition 7.1 channel audio via an S/PDIF connector and six analog audio outputs; six SATA ports, twelve USB ports, one PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot, a second PCI-E x16 slot (x4 electrical), a PCI-E x1 slot, legacy 32-bit PCI slots, and a Gigabit LAN port.