Our sources confirmed market speculations about NVIDIA’s possible launch of another chipset for Socket A processors with 400MHz FSB set to come this Spring. The Santa Clara, California-based company will reportedly add another powerful product to its chipset family that will be probably branded as something like nForce2 Ultra because it inherits most of the capabilities found in the predecessor.

Some current mainboards based on NVIDIA’s nForce2 core-logic products are already able to work with AMD Athlon XP processors featuring 400MHz EV-6 FSB, but in order to further improve performance and stability, NVIDIA will offer a more advanced nForce2 platform with native 400MHz PSB support. Obviously, other features of the nForce2, such as DASP, dual-channel memory controller and integrated GeForce4 MX graphics core will stay untouched.

We expect NVIDIA to add Serial ATA-150 and maybe even Gigabit Ethernet support to the new nForce2 MCP that will come with the so-called nForce2 Ultra in order to offer superior set of features compared to VIA KT400A and VIA KT600. NVIDIA’s upcoming nForce2 MCP will in this case support Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133, Serial ATA-150 ports, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet MACs, 3 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports, Dolby Digital encoder,  as well as PCI and ACR buses. Later NVIDIA may go even further with implementing WLAN support in its MCPs (see this news-story).

Remember that NVIDIA was also going to offer a lite-version of the nForce2 for mainstream market (see this news-story), though, we are still not hearing anything about this product.

Unfortunately, we have no information about mainboards based on the more advanced version of the nForce2 chipset.