End of Nforce?

[Eagle Eye]

With VIA officially calling it quits, Nvidia is the only thirdparty chipset vendor still shooting live rounds. But what about in 2009? On intel, it's open for debate. Nvidia has sad it believes it has a license to build chipset for the Core i7, but Intel said that's not quite true. One thing is certain: Nvidia will not have a chipset for the LGA1366-based Core i7 CPUs at all, but the company is planning one for LGA1066 CPUs when they're released later next year. Unfortunately, it's not clear whether Nvidia can do this without a lawsuit from Intel--and with graphics and PCI-E integration slated for Intel's LGA1066 CPUs, what would even be the point

Taken from MaximumPC December 2008 issue page #38 Title: Motherboard Chipsets "Bye bye, northbridge"

[encorp]

It's interesting, but there is always room for competition; hard to say where Nvidia will go but i don't see them giving up on it fast. This might buy them time to come out with something impressive for lga1066

[BrainEater]

Good riddance to bad garbage.

[Jonwall]

Maybe now they can focus completely on their graphics cards and lower their prices to what ati is capable of at launches.

[misterd]

Originally Posted by BrainEater

Good riddance to bad garbage.

sounds like you have some strikers against nforce? jk i loved the thread

[sswilson]

As much as the latest Nvidia chipsets for Intel haven't impressed me, less competition is always a bad thing, especially with Intel getting into the "full meal deal / everything integrated" mode.

[lemonlime]

Originally Posted by sswilson

As much as the latest Nvidia chipsets for Intel haven't impressed me, less competition is always a bad thing, especially with Intel getting into the "full meal deal / everything integrated" mode.

Agreed. Nice to have some enthusiast alternatives out there. Healthy competition is important.

[DarKStar]

Never had any problems with my nForce 570SLI :)

So what's going to happen on the AMD side ??? We are going to be stuck with AMD's own chipsets ? :D

[NyteOwl]

And more trouble for nVidia and owners products with their chipsets. Fudzilla - Nvidia forced to disable chipset PCI prefetch If that's true things could get nasty.

[MpG]

Yeah, it remains to be seen how that turns out. Looks like Fuad didn't bother doing much homework on that particular article.

VR-Zone (see post 5)

On the other hand: OPTi Receives Award in Arbitration...

So Nvidia claims they quit using the prefetch a long time ago, but there was just a settlement on grounds that they didn't? Time will tell, I suppose. Really, it's pretty hard to saturate the PCI bus with anything short of an old RAID card, I think. I wouldn't expect a sound card to manage it.

I'm not sure I buy the "less competition argument" in this case. Even if Intel is the sole chipset maker for their processors, they've still got competition in other areas. And those areas need good chipsets in order to maximize their own potential, which hopefully provides incentive for Intel to keep improving them. Furthermore, with numerous mobo makers using those same chipsets, there's still competition between them to extract the most performance/reliability from what they're given.