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New Faces in the Chipset Market: No Hurry

by Anna Filatova
01/19/2001 | 11:55 AM

According to the unofficial info, which we received from some mainboard manufacturers, the changes in the chipset market expected to take place because of the new companies entering it, will be postponed for a while. As you remember, there were initially expected three new products from the companies, which have never dealt with mass manufacturing of chipsets for the desktop PC market. Namely, we have expected:

NVIDIA Crush integrated chipsets family including Crush 11 and Crush 12 chipsets. Both will support Socket A processors and up to 1.5GB PC133/PC100 SDRAM or PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM correspondingly. The first Crush chipsets are to have the integrated GeForce2 MX graphics core, however, they will also support the external AGP port. The chipsets will be manufactured by TSMC with 0.18 micron technology and should cost around $35 per unit.
Micron Scimiter chipset featuring 6/8MB of memory embedded into the chipset North Bridge. This memory will fulfill the functions of the L3 cache, which should make the performance grow by 10-15%. The chipset is aimed at systems with DDR SDRAM and Socket A processors.
ATI integrated Socket370 chipset, which manufacturing appeared possible as soon as the company signed a cross-license agreement with Intel. Among the major features of this core logic we should definitely mention the integrated RADEON graphics core and SDRAM support.

This info gives us every reason to state that we will see no products based on any of these chipsets before the second half of the year. NVIDIA is going to start mass production of its chipsets only in May, while Micron and ATI will hardly be able to start mass production before Q4. Moreover, most mainboard makers are kind of concerned whether the newcomers will be able to compete with Intel and VIA, since neither NVIDIA, nor ATI, nor Micron have ever shipped mainboard chipsets in mass. So, nothing is going to change in the chipset market in the nearest future, no need to worry...

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