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nForce2 Preview

Posted by michael on from the chips-and-dips dept.

An anonymous submitter writes "I noticed that a review of NVIDIA's nForce2 chipset has been posted here. From what I can gather the chipset contains two 10/100 ethernet controllers, six USB 2.0 ports, UltraATA133 support, three 1394 ports, five PCI slots, and an integrated GeForce4 MX core including NVIDIA's nView technology and a TV Tuner." Tom's Hardware and NVNews also have looks at it.

2 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Tom's Hardware by AnimalSnf · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is it me or are the lackies being hired at Tom's are getting dummer and dummer with time? I don't have time to run down the entire list of inaccuracies and errors in the article, but according to them DDR400 "corresponds to a performance level that SDRAM could only achieve at 400 MHz," and best of all, Nvidia was "Founded in 1997 by a handful of ex-SGI employees."

  2. Not exactly accurate by ocbwilg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Intel has always been a little hostile to anyone else producing chipsets. I believe with the Pentium IV, Intel has forbidden any third parties from producing chipsets. They went after VIA hard over this issue.

    Intel actually licenses the IP necessary to design chipsets for the Pentium IV. The reason that they went after VIA for making a Pentium IV chipset was because VIA didn't go to Intel to get a license for the technology. VIA claimed that when they acquired S3 they also acquired the license to utilize the Pentium IV bus technology (since S3 had a license), and it's been fought out in the courts since then.

    Regarding Intel's hostility to third-party chipset makers, that only makes sense. After all, making chipsets for their CPU's is a large portion of Intel's business. By licensing their bus protocols to third parties Intel is making sure that they get a cut of every Pentium 4 chipset sold. They're also raising the costs of competitors chipsets to put them roughly in line with their own. Given the choice in that situation, most people would go with Intel.

    Also keep in mind that controlling the chipsets also allows you to control the technology that is used in them. The Rambus memory fiasco is an excellent example of that. Rambus turned out to be an expensive dud on the early Pentium 4 systems, but Intel was contractually obligated to support only Rambus RDRAM memory and no other memory type on the Pentium 4 for a certain period of time. During that time VIA was producing a less expensive and better performing SDRAM-based chipset for the Pentium 4. Most people went for VIA chipsets on their Pentium 4 systems and that was hurting Intel's chipset business, so Intel of course attacked in any way it could.