by Anton Shilov
02/13/2003 | 11:34 AM
While AMD continues to postpone its x86-64 processors, the chipset caravan has to keep going and bring new and exciting solutions to the market. The creator of the most advanced Socket A chipset, NVIDIA Corporation reportedly wants to continue its lead among the companies who provide the most powerful and feature-rich integrated core-logic sets; as VIDILab Croatian magazine reports in the issue available this weekend, in the course of this year NVIDIA plans to unveil both Socket A and Socket 754 intended products with the GeForce FX architecture derivative graphics cores inside.
Reportedly, the company has plans for another nForce family of chipsets for AMD Socket A processors. Being AMD’s closest chipset partner, NVIDIA is able to get the information about faster chips from the Sunnyvale-based semiconductor firm and to offer the fastest product among all competitors. NVIDIA is looking forward to bring another nForce series of core-logic products with its integrated graphics core with DirectX 9.0 support (maybe it is all about the code-name NV34 core?) and other cool features. Note that NVIDIA is not really fast in developing its core-logic products and always brings its solutions to the market half a year after the announcement. Therefore, it will be an epic of heroism for the company to actually bring its nForce3 this Summer. In fact, I have numerous doubts that it will happen, but, at least, NVIDIA has such plans and that is the point.<%BANNER[article]%>
As the Athlon 64 was postponed earlier this months, NVIDIA may discontinue its Socket 754 intended Crush K8 unveiled last year in order to bring something more advanced with NV34-alike graphics core inside.
I wonder what NVIDIA thinks about prospects of the Socket A market. At the moment it looks like it overestimates it, as there will be hardly any demand on a rather expensive chipset for the platform that will be phased-out in less than a year, thus, the company will not earn a lot of money selling handful of such products to enthusiasts. Maybe NVIDIA knows something I do not know? For instance that the Socket A will be alive till Summer/Fall 2004 and AMD will present Athlon XP 3400+ and 3600+ Socket A processors in addition to their Barton 3200+ CPU later this year?
Remember that what is shown in the roadmap is sometimes not going to appear in the real life just because companies change their roadmaps based on the market situation.