AMD, PCI-Express & Next Gen nForce

NVIDIA has shown in the past that they can make a very solid chipset. While the first generation nForce was not a huge success, it did pave the road for the nForce 2 (which proved to be the best overall Athlno based chipset for its generation). The nForce 3 150 was a bit of a flop, but NVIDIA came back with the nForce 3 250 series, which is again proving to be a very successful part. The next generation looks to improve upon that, and NVIDIA appears to not mind making it to market after its competition. If this extra time spent equals a better part, then coming to market 3 months after the competition is not a bad thing, especially considering that due to the architecture of the AMD Athlon 64/Opteron, a solidly built next gen nForce will probably be in the market a very, very long time.

The nForce 2 has lasted a very long time, and I fully expect to see NVIDIA’s PCI-E products to remain relatively unchanged for the next year and a half after its introduction (which measured in chipset time is quite a span). If NVIDIA can produce a very solid PCI-E product, along with a robust feature set to go along with it, then they will again be in a dominant position in the AMD market. While it has been essentially confirmed that there will not be a SoundStorm 2 functionality integrated into these next chipsets, do not discount the possible implementation of the Azalia technology standard.

AMD and PCI-Express @ Penstar Systems