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nVidia nForce
cygnus writes: "Hardcore tech upstart site ExtremeTech.com got to check out an nVidia reference board, their findings are here. While most of the drivers and hardware were beta, they gave it some positive play. The story has a few large photos that are worth a gander... The reference board has only two PCI slots and no onboard Ethernet. Ouch. I'll stick with my Mac for now."
So I assume when you say it only has support for 2 PCI slots you mean, "It supports 5 PCI slots, just like all the other AMD-supporting chipsets, but this one board only implemented two of them, which is irrelevant to us because it's merely a reference board and we'll all buy the Asus full ATX that they've already designed," right?
This is a self-referential sig
One neat thing that this chipset supports is the so-called "twin-bank" technology. This interleaves access to the DDR DIMMS (ie. byte 1 is on DIMM1, byte #2 in on DIMM#2, byte #3 in on DIMM #3) to pump up the maximum memory bandwidth beyond what a single DDR DIMM would be capable of. I guess they had to do this since the GPU uses system memory (ugh), but it has a nice side-effect of really unleashing the performance potential of 1ghz+ CPU's, especially if you ditched the onboard video and stuck something decent in the AGP slot.
;)
And to think, my 386 had interleaved memory back in the day..I was 'leet and didn't even know it
AMD recently claimed they would have 30% overall market share by the end of the year, their goal before launching their 64 bit processor. It seems they are on track to meet those expectations. With NVidia's chipset offering a low-cost affordable solution for low-end machines and the 760MP chipset offering us the world's first multiprocessor AMD platform, they are putting themselves in a position to have real sway in the coming 64 bit desktop revolution.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
This puts it in a strange position in the market. The chipset is very powerful, yet the graphics will be decidedly average when the chipset is finally being sold on the market. It beats all the other integrated systems out there (the audio system is to die for, beating the SBLive! into a cocked hat) by a massive margin, but they only cost like $20 a pop anyway!
The SiS735 looks to be the other chipset to look out for, beating the VIA and AMD solutions at the moment, and being a much cheaper single chip solution.
Both chipsets incorporate next generation interconnects - nForce uses an 800MB/s Hyperlink connection, and the SiS uses a 1.2GB/s multi-threaded connection (possible due to the single chip design).
VIA will soon be releasing their second shot at a DDR chipset for the Athlon, called the KT266Pro, without the problems the first one had, and improved DDR memory interface.
Whatever, the future is looking great for the Athlon in terms of chipset support, which now covers the entire low to medium end of the market (up to workstations and low-medium end servers with the 760MP).
If they intend to take on Intel's i810 and i815 successes, then why do it with a chipset for an AMD CPU instead of one for Intel's? Sure AMD is getting bigger and bigger, but I haven't seen any marketshare survey give them more than 30% at best. And with the current largest PC maker in the world (Dell) not selling Athlon's at all they're severely limiting the reach of this new chipset it seems.
Seriously, it's great that motherboard-makers like Asus are going to integrate the nForce, but what's the use? People building their own PC (the ones buying Asus/Abit/MSI/etc. boards) probably don't want to get an integrated GeForce2 MX...
So anybody know what the deal is? Licensing?
Now nVidia is going to make it possible to make an integrated motherboard, and the performance is going to be excellent. The Duron totally crushes the Celeron, the GeForce MX totally crushes the 810 onboard video, and the audio DSPs totally crush everything currently on the market. As long as the price for a Duron plus one of these boards is about the same as the price for a Celeron plus an 810 motherboard, they will sell a whole bunch of these.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Too bad you haven't bothered to read about the nForce before commenting. The nForce supports an AGP slot, and in fact in the article they mention putting a better video card in with no problems.
This sounds great to me. Small M/B, reasonable graphics, sound etc. Mix with a wee power supply and a laptop HDD and I'll have a PC that I can comfortably carry to work & back. Personally couldn't care less if it had NO PCI slots, but it must have ethernet.
A couple of days ago there was an article here on /. discussing the nature of content the ExtremeTech.com website. Some comments on that article at the time (including mine) made the mistake of assuming that the site was being run by ZD Net, which is a subsidiary of C|Net, which most readers here look down upon, however, aparently that information was in error. The tite is in fact managed by ZD Media which is a new division of Ziff Davis Publishing.
/. article is defintely worth a read though, when evaluating content from the Extreme Tech website.
The earlier
Having said that, and regardless of the earlier postings here indicating inacuracies in the ExtremeTech hardware review being discussed here, I have to say the site look quite well put together and editorially fair.
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
...with a smattering of "I'm a real hard core tech site" pasted on front. (Modding myself down 1 point.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The chipset's North Bridge- Dubbed the "IGP", it provides for more efficient use of memory bandwidth using the GeForce3's crossbar switching technology. Note that this is the same kind of technology that SGI, Sun, and other high-performance UNIX hardware vendors have been using for their memory architecture (drool...)
Support for 128-bit DDR memory- This is just amazing. Not only will their particular implementation allow you to put different sizes of DIMMS in the board, but it will also allow DDR memory to boost it's bandwidth 100%, which means that instead of maxing out at 2.1GB/sec, it maxes out at 4.2GB/sec (again, drool...)
The link between the North and South Bridges- This will support bandwidth up to 800MB/sec, which means that it will have an excess even under unusual conditions, such as maxing out ATA/100, maxing out the PCI bus and outputting 256 streams of digital audio all at the same time. Simply awesome.
The built-in audio- The article gives a lengthy description of this. Suffice to say, it is better than any consumer card available today, built-in or otherwise.
Built-in graphics system- This actually was a little disappointing to me, because, while they may have it running at essentially AGP 6x, they used their budget system, the GeForce2 MX, for the processing. I'm also disappointed that it uses a "shared video memory" architecture that can be found in a lot of deplorable video platforms, notably the Intel i810 chipset. Basically, it uses up to 32MB of system memory for the frame buffer in addition to its onboard memory. However, with the huge amount of bandwidth available to the system memory, this may or may not be an issue.
Lack of support for 1394 and 64-bit PCI- Regrettably, they don't seem to have included support for either Firewire or 64-bit PCI. The lack of 1394 support is particularly surprising, as it has gotten increasingly better support from both Windows ME and Windows XP, as these are the main platforms which will be running on this board.
All in all, I think this is going to be an awesome board, a real leap ahead of everything else out there for the x86 market right now, at least in the consumer arena. I look forward to buying one, if the sticker shock isn't too harsh ;-).
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Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Get used to this sort of thing. These guys are going to be _the_ 'everybody' in the statement you may be hearing a lot of... "No, you can't put out a negative review of our product. No, not even a little tiny bit. Everybody else is perfectly happy to accept our terms on this, take it or leave it..."
Oh joy :P
Another interesting problem is the issue of memory bandwidth. There is some concern, rightfully, about available system memory bandwidth when using the integrated graphics core. In theory, the CPU should always be able to grab memory bandwidth first. When using the built-in IGP graphics, the memory streaming tests came in about 15-20% lower than when a GeForce2 Ultra was dropped into the AGP slot. This is possibly related to their memory arbitration logic still being enabled and consuming cycles even when nothing else is truly vying with the CPU for memory access.Another interesting problem is the issue of memory bandwidth. There is some concern, rightfully, about available system memory bandwidth when using the integrated graphics core. In theory, the CPU should always be able to grab memory bandwidth first. When using the built-in IGP graphics, the memory streaming tests came in about 15-20% lower than when a GeForce2 Ultra was dropped into the AGP slot. This is possibly related to their memory arbitration logic still being enabled and consuming cycles even when nothing else is truly vying with the CPU for memory access.
Exactly how does the reviewer think the picture is getting on the screen if the RAMDAC isn't accessing main memory? Even suggesting that the CPU should have higher priority than the RAMDAC is either ignorance or stupidity. Of course the RAMDAC has to have priority or you are going to end up with big blank patches on the screen!!
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Check your BIOS: If you have a setting called "Memory Interleave" or something like that, you likely can do this with your motherboard today. The motherboard I have that does this (an EPOX EP-MVP3G) has three settings: None, Two Bank, and Four Bank. Benchmarks suggest a major improvement with a K6-2/450 when Two Bank is selected, although I don't have enough slots to try Four Bank out (it just reverts to two, or so it seems).
And dareth I mention it, many Macintoshes have been able to do this for quite some time now. Just add extra RAM to a Mac, make sure all the SIMMs are identical, and you will suddenly have a nice performance boost for more than one reason.
OK, I'll correct you ;)
The onboard video DOES NOT have integrated frame buffer memory. This is the same for most i810's, i815's etc. In fact, you can lower system performance by running your monitor at a higher refresh rate! To find out how much memory bandwidth your monitor is using on these things, mulitply your screen number of pixels (width * height) by 2 for 16-bit color or 4 for 24/32 bit color. This will give you how many bytes per refresh the RAMDAC is using. Multiply that by your refresh rate (ex. 85) and you have bytes per second. Take this off of your maximum memory bandwidth, and that's what you have left for your CPU. Not a great situation!
Dan
_damnit_
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Man, I better go buy some Intel hardware. God knows they need the support. Those poor guys with their great CPUs have never amounted to anything, and now nVidia's really going to crush them. It's a shame.