X-bit labs

December 2003 Hardware News Overview (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 12/19/2003 | 05:36 PM ]

ATI is just making promises, too. Among the company’s current products, only the RADEON 9100 IGP chipset enjoys some acknowledgement from the manufacturers. Biostar announced the P4ARA mainboard based on that chipset, but the mainboard is not much in itself. As for the future plans, ATI promises to give us a new chipset codenamed RS400 in the second quarter of 2004: integrated DirectX 9-compatible graphics core, dual-channel DDR and DDR-II (?) memory, PCI Express support. This chipset is going to better ATI’s position in the chipset market, which is downright poor nowadays.

ATI Technologies is also going to test its muscle at building chipsets for the Athlon 64. It’s all the same: integrated DirectX 9-compatible graphics core, dual-channel DDR-II and PCI Express. Besides that, the company follows NVIDIA’s example and announces a version of the chipset without the integrated graphics. If ATI’s dreams come true, we’ll see all of this in just half a year.

NVIDIA is not sparkling in the chipsets market lately, too, especially in the calm waters of the Athlon XP chipset niche where the long-anticipated new South Bridge, MCP-S, has not appeared yet. The “S” stands for Serial ATA support, which is missing in the current NVIDIA chipsets making the mainboard manufacturers use extra onboard controllers to implement this function. The ABIT AN7 had been promised to use this Bridge, but it came out in November with the old one, MCP-T, and an integrated Serial ATA controller from Silicon Image.

ABIT AN7

NVIDIA has nothing to be proud of as concerns chipsets for the Athlon 64, while the competitors were more successful. SiS announced its first Socket 939 chipset, that is, for Athlon FX mainboards with the dual-channel memory mode. The chipset is called SiS755FX, and first Athlon 64 FX processors for the Socket 939 are only scheduled for the next year, so that’s a kind of “paper” announcement.

Elitegroup was more practical releasing its 755-A mainboard for the Athlon 64. November, these mainboards were spotted in the not-so-cheap Tokyo retail stores for about $100. Considering the rate of cheapening of the processor and mainboards, the Athlon 64 may become a reasonable option in a little while, especially if you forget that getting a 32-bit performance comparable to the Athlon XP and Pentium 4, you pay a lot for the 64-bit capabilities that you can’t use yet.

Anyway, NVIDIA may strike back as soon as December when the new chipset series for the Athlon 64/Opteron, nForce3 250, should be announced. They have been promising it from summer, but there have been problems with the Serial ATA realization. Strangely enough, this interface has become a real nightmare for the NVIDIA engineers. Overall, the new chipset will bring nothing particularly new with itself, differing from the well-known nForce3 150 in this very Serial ATA support only.