As we have actually predicted, NVIDIA announced the launching of its second generation system chipsets last week. As usual, the first country to receive the official launch turned out the country of the Rising Sun, i.e. Japan.

Surprising as it might seem, but it is for the first time in the company’s history that they refused to stick to the tradition of increasing the product indexes the usual was and called the newcomer nForce2 instead of nForce8xx, as we might have expected them to knowing the whole story.

As usual, there are two versions of the chipset North Bridge announced: one with the integrated graphics core (SPP) and the one without it (IGP). The chipsets are called nForce2-ST and nForce2-GT respectively. They also announced a new South Bridge MCP-T, though the mainboard makers may stick to the old MCP-D (with DD decoder) if they wish. The chipset specs have been already discussed many times, so we will simply list them briefly for your reference:

• North Bridge (840-pin BGA): Socket A platform, two DDR400/DDR333/DDR266 channels (PC3200/PC2700/PC2100), integrated GeForce4 MX graphics core (only in nForce2-GT, in nForce2-GT the core is disabled), AGP 8x.
• South Bridge (484-pin BGA): ATA/133, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 Ethernet MAC inherited from nForce 4xx, new 10/100 Ethernet MAC from 3Com (i.e. there are two 10/100 Ethernet MAC chips), 3 IEEE1394 ports, Dolby Digital decoder, ACR.

And now a few words about the differences between the new nForce2 and the old nForce 4xx:

• Support of the dual-channel DDR400/DDR333 memory, which increases the maximum theoretical bandwidth of the memory up to 6.4GB/sec. Unfortunately, with the 2.1GB/sec system bus this fast memory will hardly have any positive effect on the performance.
• AGP 8x support. We will be able to say what it is worth only in August, when NV18 and NV28 are to come (see this news story).
• New NVIDIA South Bridge differs from the older one by the implemented USB 2.0, IEEE 1394 and the second 10/100 Ethernet MAC.

Unfortunately, we don’t know yet how much the new NVIDIA chipsets will cost. We know only that the company does have an idea of the cost (at first NVIDIA wanted to sell its nForce 420-B for $99, which is incredible for the chipset market). So, we hope that the discrete nForce2-ST will sell for some $25, and nForce2-GT – not more than $35. and the company to manufacture these solutions is definitely not a hard guess to make: TSMC (0.15micron manufacturing technology).