More nForce 415-D Tidbits

by Anna Filatova
01/09/2002 | 02:24 PM

In addition to the official information on the new NVIDIA nForce 415-D chipset, which we have already told you (see this news story), we managed to get hold of some more very curious unofficial facts thanks to Digitimes.

• First, now we know the price of the first discrete solution from NVIDIA. It will be selling to the mainboard manufacturers at a little less than $30. In other words, nForce 415-D chipset costs just a bit more than similar solutions from VIA (KT266A) and SiS (SiS735, SiS745).
• Second, there finally appeared more or less credible info about the price of nForce 420-D chipset, which we could only guess before. This solution is $20 more expensive than nForce 415-D, which makes a bit below $50.
• Third, the situation with the shipments schedule has become more or less clear now, as the shipment dates for the new nForce 415-D were not mentioned in the official press-release. The largest mainboard manufacturers report that they got the first engineering samples of the new chipset last week and that they have already started working on the mainboard design. The development stage shouldn’t last too long, because IGP-420 and SPP North Bridges are pin-to-pin compatible. As for the mass shipments of the chipset, they are most likely to start as soon as the mainboard manufacturers have their mainboards ready, since this is not a new chipset but just cull.
• And the last thing we would like to mention here is the profit NVIDIA is planning to get by launching this chipset. In fact, its announcement was pretty predictable, because the integrated graphics core of most today’s integrated chipsets occupies over 80% of the die size and hence can very often be the reason for chip culling. Disregarding the graphics core the manufacturer can significantly increase the chipset yields and raise the profitability of the entire product family (Intel did the same thing having launched i815/P/EP after the announcement of its i815/E chipset).