ICH2
In early 2000 Intel had suffered a significant setback with the i820 northbridge. Customers were not willing to pay the high prices for RDRAM and either bought i810 or i440BX motherboards or changed to the competition. The hastily developed 82815 northbridge for PC-133 SDRAM became Intel's method to recover in the middle class segment.
The ICH1 or the new ICH2 (360 pins) could be placed to the side of the 82815. An ICH2 could also be used with Intel's 82850 chipset, which, like the 82820 before it, required the use of RDRAM and supported the Pentium 4 CPU. For the first time a Fast Ethernet chip (82559) was integrated into the southbridge, depending upon an external PHY chip.
The PATA interface was accelerated to ATA/100 and the number of USB connections was doubled to four. The integrated AC'97 sound controller gained support for up to six channel sound.
There was also a mobile variant called the ICH2-M.
The following variants existed:
- 82801BA (ICH2)
- 82801BAM (ICH2-M) Mobile
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