With the high-end Pentium III's out of the way (and most likely out of pocket) we turn now to the lower-end sector. As we told you back at Computex this year, the Celeron 500MHz has been pulled back to an August 9th release date. We wish it hadn't but there you go.

The BX has been around for over 18months now and has proven that it can live longer than a California Redwood (at least in the PC market). In any event, Q3 will see the introduction of their Intel 820 and 810e chipset and deliver RNG, AC97, ATA-66 with WfM2.0 features. Just to remind you, the Intel 820 will encompass greater bandwidth capabilities via RDRAM, which should be scalable to the core processors speed by late Q3. Our biggest hope is for AGP 4X, which should put to rest any AGP demons. Graphics cards such as the TNT2 and G400 (3dfx will of course have an AGP 4X part by then) will really come into their own here. Systems based upon the 8XX chipset will take full use of the 133MHz front-side bus and RDRAM of course. As this is an Intel Roadmap we won't go into VIA and their 133MHz FSB- it just isn't tennis.

Gamers might not be waiting on their haunches (the i752 built-on won't do much), glove in hand, for the i810e & SDRAM but Intel plans on pitching this chipset straight into the Performance Mainstream and Value PC market segments. Just to re-iterate, the i810e will not only support the Celeron line of processors but also the Pentium III, which will come in handy for the 133MHz FSB versions of the Pentium III (once VIA and their 133Mhz have been beaten up some by Intel). There's always the VIA 133FSB…