Nvidia hails nForce as 'revolutionary'

Nvidia will expand into the integrated motherboards market following the launch of its nForce series chipset at Computex in Taiwan last week.

Nvidia will expand into the integrated motherboards market following the launch of its nForce series chipset at Computex in Taiwan last week.

The vendor claimed that nForce, suitable only for AMD technology, will be a revolutionary PC platform design integrating system, graphics, communications and audio hardware based on technology it developed for Microsoft's X-box.

An Nvidia GeForce2 GTS provides the integrated graphics in the chipset and a GeForce3-based motherboard will follow within 18 months. Audio comes from an Nvidia-designed real-time 3D Dolby Digital surround-sound chip. A built-in Ethernet connection is included, as well as the standard array of parallel and USB ports.

The motherboards will be released in two flavours: the nForce 220 supports a single 64-bit double data rate (DDR) memory channel, while the nForce 420 supports two parallel 64-bit DDR memory channels. Both support 200Mhz and 266Mhz DDR SDRam.

Dan Vivoli, Nvidia's senior vice president of marketing, said: "We have great hopes for this product. It is the biggest announcement in our history because it broadens our product offerings substantially. We believe the nForce will provide five to 10 times the graphics performance of any other integrated PC graphics accelerator."

Vivoli added that Nvidia already has plans to develop the nForce chipset for use in laptops.

Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Mitac and Abit will produce the first round of motherboards based on nForce. Additional manufacturers are expected to be announced over the coming months.

Jon Peddie, president of analyst John Peddie Associates, backed Nvidia's new chipset design.

"Modern PCs are being used in ways the original PC was never designed for. Streaming video, 3D graphics, complex audio and high-speed networking are common today and put tremendous stress on PC system architecture. Nvidia's new chipset architecture has an innovative design that is better suited to these applications," he said.

Also published in Computer Reseller News