According to the forecasts made by Taiwanese mainboard manufacturers, integrated chipsets get more and more popular this year. By the end of the first half of the year, the share of integrated chipsets is expected to reach 35% of the entire chipset market (compared to 25% achieved last year), and by the end of 2001 this value should grow up to 40%.
We would also like to mention that none of the manufacturers specified which integrated chipsets they actually meant. We suppose that this growth will be noticeable mostly due to those chipsets, which do not support external AGP graphics (Intel 810E2/815G/815EG, VIA PL133/PLE133/KL133/KLE133, etc.). The tendency of the world computer industry towards making a personal computer one of the every day electric appliances has become quite evident lately. Therefore many computer assemblers are more willing to use low-cost systems with minimal upgradeability. The same idea gets proven by the intentions of the leading chipset makers (Intel, VIA and SiS), which are going to launch a lot of chipsets like that this year.
All in all, greater popularity of the integrated chipsets will be also backed up by the presence of totally new figures here: ATI and NVIDIA (which should start mass production of their integrated chipset solutions in Q4 2001), as well as Micron Company.