NVIDIA Corp. confirmed development and sampling of its chipsets that contain integrated graphics core in the most recent financial call on Thursday. The claims made by the company’s chief executive officer confirm that the company has integrated chipsets in the roadmap and adds some resolution to the strategy of NVIDIA in the chipset market.

“We have announced sampling of our first integrated graphics after many-many years and we expect this to be an important growth strategy for us,” said Jen-Hsen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO.

Earlier this year mainboard maker FIC showcased prototypes of its products featuring NVIDIA code-named C51 chipset. The company said the core-logic featured integrated graphics cores. While NVIDIA is tight-lipped over the core-logic code-named C51, some details about the chipset are still available: the C51G is a two-chip value solution for AMD Athlon 64 market. It provides an integrated graphics core, PCI Express x16 slot for add-in graphics cards and can connect to the company’s forthcoming media and communication processors that feature Serial ATA-II, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express x1, FireWire, USB 2.0 as well as other I/O features.

The C51 chipsets are expected to support both Socket 939 and Socket 754 microprocessors with 800MHz and 1000MHz HyperTransort speeds.

It is very likely that the C51 chipset features GeForce 6200-like graphics core which incorporates memory controller enhancements that can reduce the impact high latency memory access, which is a result of memory controller integrated into AMD Athlon 64-series processors. Still some sources suggested that the C51 sports GeForce 4-like integrated graphics unit.

“We learnt a few years ago that you really have to become a world-class chipset company first [to make chipsets with integrated graphics cores]; because we are already a world-class GPU company, there is plenty of graphics that we can find and integrate into that chipset. So, we decided to focus our energy on development of the storage, networking, security processors, technologies necessary to be a world-class supplier of chipsets,” Jen-Hsen Huang stated.

At this time is not clear whether NVIDIA is preparing chipsets with integrated graphics for AMD Athlon 64 platform only or has plans to produce similar logic for Intel Pentium-supporting computers.