by Anna Filatova
01/08/2002 | 11:52 PM
Having undertaken an attempt to enter the integrated chipset market with a new nForce 420 and nForce 220 solutions last year, NVIDIA got inspired for further feats. This time, the company decided to try its luck in the discrete chipset market. Today they announced their first discrete chipset nForce 415-D.
nForce 415-D incorporates the already familiar MCP-D South Bridge and a new SPP (System Platform Processor) North Bridge, differing from the integrated IGP-420 only by the absence of the integrated graphics core. This way, nForce 415-D is none other but nForce 420-D, but without the integrated graphics, though it is pin-compatible with the integrated counterpart. As a result, the newcomer retained all the key features of the nForce chipset family: it supports TwinBank architecture (two PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM channels), features DASP (dynamic adaptive speculative pre-processor), supports external AGP 4x graphics cards and has an APU (Audio Processing Unit) with the built-in Dolby Digital coder. Like in other members of the family, the North and South Bridges of nForce 415-D are connected by the HyperTransport bus with 800MB/sec bandwidth.
The production of nForce 415-D chipset has already started. The first mainboards based on it are promised to appear in the end of the month.
We would like to mention separately, why nForce 415-D actually appeared. At first glance, there seem to be two reasons for that. First, NVIDIA gets the opportunity to make use of those nForce 420 chipsets that have a defective or falsely working graphics core. As is known, the graphics core occupies over half of the die size by the integrated chipsets that is why if the chipset is not working properly then the probability of the graphics core being the one to blame for that is very high. Second, we should also take into account some marketing reasons. No wonder that nForce’s popularity left much to be desired because of its relatively high price. nForce 415-D will be selling to the mainboard manufacturers at a much lower price, which gives us the reason to hope that this NVIDIA’s offspring will get more popular than the predecessor. Although the mainboard manufacturers are not that enthusiastic about nForce 415-D either. Only two companies: ASUS and MSI expressed their desire to use the new NVIDIA chipset in their mainboards.