Everybody have been waiting long and impatiently for NVIDIA to update their nForce2 chipset, which was announced quite a while ago already and which features dealing with peripheral devices support have already become pretty outdated. At present NVIDIA nForce2 chipset is one of the best performing solution for Socket A platforms but unfortunately, it doesn't support Serial ATA. Today it got clear that this situation is very likely to change soon. According to TechReport, NVIDIA is going to announce a new nForce2 South Bridge (MCP) family, which will boast updated new features.

The new MCP will have the same features set as the upcoming nForce3 250Gb chipset. The sources report that the new MCP for nForce2 will have native support for Serial ATA RAID and NVIDIA Hardware Firewall. Unfortunately, according to our sources, the upcoming new MCP for nForce2 will lose their APU. This way the mainboard manufacturers will have to choose if they would like to offer mainboard with the integrated APU or with the NVIDIA native Serial ATA, but not the both.

We do not know yet, what is the exact launch schedule for the new MCP, however, they should evidently start shipping within the same timeframe as nForce3 250, i.e. in Q2 2004.

NVIDIA representative refused to comment on this story yet.