NVIDIA To Make Intel Chipsets

Intel users have pretty much had only one choice, Intel, to supply their chipsets, with VIA and SiS offerings occupying an insignificant portion of motherboard logic sales. But that’s all about to change: nVidia has finally secured a bus license from Intel and is planning an nForce chipset for Intel CPUs.

…To earn my respect, nVidia’s come a long way from the humble original nForce chipset, with its lackluster performance compared to VIA’s contemporary offering. The nForce2 was a smash hit for the Athlon crowd. nForce3 150 was a tentative step into the 64-bit world, but the nForce3 250 has now shown itself to be perhaps the best “Hammer” chipset there is. ATI may yet change that, but for the moment nVidia is where it’s at.

Intel’s embrace of nVidia gave me a bit of pause with the language, though. “Broad” and “cross-licensing” in the same sentence is scary when Intel is involved. If you don’t believe me, ask AMD, another company that entered into a “broad cross-licensing” deal with Intel decades ago. Somehow I don’t think there’s any love lost between AMD and Intel these days.

I hope nVidia doesn’t end up regretting whatever it is it had to give away in order to secure Intel’s permission.

nVidia to make Intel chipsets - Prominent AMD chipset maker decides to play both sides of the fence @ Geek News