X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 9)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 01/08/2004 | 11:51 PM ]

The last year brought considerable progress in South Bridge building, although the potential of the new solutions was not always used to the full. ICH5/ICH5R, VT8237, SiS964 – they all offer SerialATA, RAID 0+1 and 5.1 audio. Well, the latter thing is rather about audio codecs, but integrated sound traditionally refers to South Bridges.

Unfortunately, all these new capabilities have had different fates. While many manufacturers are already implementing SerialATA ports as there are SerialATA drives in the market, RAID is less popular (maybe it deserves it). As for 5.1 sound, mainstream mainboards often come without it or without a bracket with the S/PDIF output.

In the new year, and in the new South Bridge generation, we are likely to see the integrated Gigabit Ethernet becoming a standard. That’s most welcome, as higher bandwidth may reveal new uses for local networks. Next, I sincerely hope for the new audio codec from Intel – the Azalia. I also hope that the manufacturers will slow down on 7.1 audio and wait until demand catches up with the supply, i.e. when 7.1 audio systems and 7.1 sound in applications (especially in games) get widespread enough.

Talking about South Bridges, NVIDIA was most unlucky with them in 2003. They were promising us a South Bridge for the nForce2 with SerialATA support, but never released one, and they also did the same with the nForce3 Pro 250 chipset that was to differ from the nForce3 150 in this exactly SerialATA support. Well, by an odd coincidence, VIA Technologies also spent much time implementing SerialATA in their VT8237 South Bridge.

By the way, these two companies, VIA and NVIDIA, were grappling in 2003 for the shrinking market of Athlon XP chipsets. Of course, AMD tried to help them the best it could offering the Athlon XP with a 400MHz system bus in spring, which required new products from chipset makers, just like with the 800MHz QPB for the Pentium 4. NVIDIA got the upper hand, showing its nForce2 400 Ultra, quite a cute chipset (well, they actually had to add FSB400 support into the official specs, as this support had already been unofficially implemented in the nForce2).

VIA was quite confusing about the generations of its chipsets, announcing at once the KT400A (the KT400 plus PC3200 support), and the KT600 (the same plus FSB400). Of course, the manufacturers who announced mainboards on the first chipset later waited until the arrival of the second one. However, KT600 never enjoyed the popularity of KT400. So, here NVIDIA wins the round, no doubt.

NVIDIA also feels quite confident in the chipset market for the Athlon 64/Opteron where the nForce3 Pro 150 seems more prominent than the VIA K8T800, although it is hard to say that any of them is a definite leader. It seems more like equilibrium with a certain advantage on NVIDIA’s side. The competition should get fiercer in 2004 with another round of chipsets: the nForce3 Pro 250 (nForce3 Pro 150 + SATA) against the K8T800Pro (HyperTransport sped up to 1GHz plus Socket939 Athlon 64 support). This time NVIDIA will be somewhat late as it is going to roll out a Socket939 chipset later.