Friday, October 9th 2009
NVIDIA Halts Development of Core i5 & Core i7 Chipsets
There was a time when for the Intel platform, you could choose between motherboards based on chipsets from four or more vendors. With the weakening and discontinuation of chipset development for the Intel platform from the likes of VIA, and SiS, and NVIDIA facing a technical and legal blockade with further development of Intel chipsets with the latest Intel processors having integrated memory controllers and the Quickpath Interconnect system interface, consumer choice is reduced to platform core logic coming only from Intel, while motherboard vendors are able to use additives such as the NVIDIA nForce 200 PCI-Express bridge chip, or even the latest LucidLogix Hydra controller, among additional SATA, SAS and Ethernet controllers, to enhance the motherboards' feature-set beyond what the chipset can provide.
Following NVIDIA making the right noises about the future of its chipset division and development of chipsets that drive Socket LGA-1156 processors, it is becoming increasingly clear that its development has hit a possible legal or technical hurdle. Until those issues are ironed out completely, NVIDIA will not invest in further development of that chipset. In a statement, NVIDIA expressed its official position of its chipset division, and where things stand specific to the products it makes. Speaking of which, NVIDIA's chipset division currently sells chipsets for Intel's FSB-driven processors, AMD's latest processors, and the ION platform, which forms the foundation of a more capable ULPC platform based on the Intel Atom processor.
The statement that pertains to the DMI chipset reads:
Despite facing over three years of competition with ATI (which later formed AMD's own desktop chipset division under the Graphics Products Group), NVIDIA claims to lead AMD quantitatively in sales of chipset for the AMD processor platform. NVIDIA's ION platform, which is gaining in popularity and scoring design wins, is poised for further development.
In spite of impending problems, NVIDIA maintains an optimistic outlook with its chipset division catering to both Intel and AMD processor platforms. "We expect our MCP [chipset] business for both Intel and AMD to be strong well into the future," the statement added.
Following NVIDIA making the right noises about the future of its chipset division and development of chipsets that drive Socket LGA-1156 processors, it is becoming increasingly clear that its development has hit a possible legal or technical hurdle. Until those issues are ironed out completely, NVIDIA will not invest in further development of that chipset. In a statement, NVIDIA expressed its official position of its chipset division, and where things stand specific to the products it makes. Speaking of which, NVIDIA's chipset division currently sells chipsets for Intel's FSB-driven processors, AMD's latest processors, and the ION platform, which forms the foundation of a more capable ULPC platform based on the Intel Atom processor.
The statement that pertains to the DMI chipset reads:
We will continue to innovate integrated solutions for Intel's FSB architecture. We firmly believe that this market has a long healthy life ahead. But because of Intel's improper claims to customers and the market that we aren't licensed to the new DMI bus and its unfair business tactics, it is effectively impossible for us to market chipsets for future CPUs. So, until we resolve this matter in court next year, we'll postpone further chipset investments for Intel DMI CPUs.As for chipsets that drive Intel's Socket LGA-775 processors, NVIDIA said that it will continue to innovate integrated solutions. The company already has the high-end segment covered with its nForce 700i Series chipsets, while gaining ground on its recently-introduced single-chip chipsets with GeForce 9000 motherboard GPUs. The aforementioned recent report also mentioned development of chipsets with even more powerful integrated graphics, with dedicated memory, and support for DDR3 system memory.
Despite facing over three years of competition with ATI (which later formed AMD's own desktop chipset division under the Graphics Products Group), NVIDIA claims to lead AMD quantitatively in sales of chipset for the AMD processor platform. NVIDIA's ION platform, which is gaining in popularity and scoring design wins, is poised for further development.
In spite of impending problems, NVIDIA maintains an optimistic outlook with its chipset division catering to both Intel and AMD processor platforms. "We expect our MCP [chipset] business for both Intel and AMD to be strong well into the future," the statement added.
47 Comments on NVIDIA Halts Development of Core i5 & Core i7 Chipsets
It seems that Nvidia are pulling out of less profitable highend products so they can focus their efforts on more profitable areas like netbook and mobile phone chipsets.
It is bad news for the PC consumer though.
I just wanted to say this is a little worse than blocking support of a feature like PhysX. Intel is block all possibility to make chipsets for their processors which is unfair business practice. It is like AMD suddenly saying ATI graphics cards will only work with AMD chipsets and detected AMD processors. If you ATI, you buy the whole package which would be unfair.
All this back stabbing crap needs to stop.
This crap about nVidia requiring a licencing fee, or charging ATi needs to stop. This was never the case, CUDA and PhysX are both completely free. Any hardware manufacturer can adapt their hardware use support it free of charge, they just have to write the drivers to support it. ATi didn't even have to do that, a 3rd party was willing to do all the driver developement for them, they just had to include the additions in the driver, and they still refused.
I don't even have AMD hardware right now but Its not right and I'm never going to agree that it is right, I could go deeper than that but I don't want to derail the thread.
this is news?
it isnt the kinda first post you expect is it :laugh:
www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105793
NF2 was awesome with Soundstorm, NF4 was awesome even though it was missing out on Soundstorm, and then all of the buggy and power-hungry chipsets after that just did not capture the same attention that NF2/3/4 did. We do not seem to be complaining about the lack of NForce chipsets for Corei7's (at least I definitely am not, enjoying my Intel ICH10R).
No seriously though, that's the way things are headed:shadedshu (buy it'd be Sky Vision [ISP] instead of Sky Net, lol, kiddin again...sigh).