Introduction
Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s CEO didn’t make it to the launch, leaving it up to his Senior Vice President of Sales, who welcomed the chance to upgrade to a bigger room now that the CEO’s suite was available
Today, in a press conference in Taipei, Taiwan, during the Computex computer trade show, NVIDIA announced nForce, its integrated graphics, audio, Northbridge, and Southbridge chipset, also referred to as Crush.
The new logo for nForce – the theme and layout will be applied to all of NVIDIA’s logos
NVIDIA’s nForce is, as the company repeatedly told us at the launch, a grounds up design of an integrated chipset, rather than “graphics bolted here, and audio bolted there”, which could have been a reference to any number of competing products. Yes, it is a new architecture for the PC, in some ways, and it owes much to Xbox, delivering all the multimedia capabilities you would need for a PC, while tightly coupling the Northbridge and Southbridge functions.
nFORCE Architecture
The nForce platform consists of three parts:
- A memory controller that can accesses to two banks of SDR or DDR SDRAM, thus sporting a 128-bit bit wide memory interface with a cross-bar configuration, which doubles the memory bandwidth as halves the memory latency of common SDR/DDR SDRAM solutions. The interface to the CPU also includes Nvidia’s dynamic adaptive speculative pre-processor (DASP), which predicts, and pre-fetches data to improve the performance of CPU requests for data from memory. NVIDIA claims that nForce increases Athlon performance by up to 20%.
- The memory controller and DASP are housed inside the Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) that also includes a GeForce2MX-style GPU, offering an integrated 3D-solution that is worlds apart from currently known chipsets with integrated 3D-graphics decelerators, such as Intel’s i810, i815 or VIA’s KM133.
- The Multimedia Communications Processor (MCP) is the connected to the IGP using a HyperTransport interface (8-bit wide, 400 MHz, differential), and houses the impressively featured Audio Processing Unit (APU – the audio from the Xbox including Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding), which comprises a sound unit several times as powerful as a Creative Live card. It also comes with a complete suite of networking and communications interfaces, including 10/100Base-T Ethernet and home phone-line networking (HomePNA 2.0).
The nForce architecture or, as Nvidia likes to call it, a distributed platform architecture. Tom’s got plenty to say about it in his in-depth analysis coming soon.
nFORCE Motherboards
Pricing for nForce motherboards was not released, but we do know that there will be two versions of the nForce, a 220 and a 420, the former being limited to a 64-bit memory interface. From what we hear, the extra premium that NVIDIA expects to get for nForce would price an nForce motherboard at anywhere between $12-22 higher than a competing chipset, but without all the features that NVIDIA brings to the table. NVIDIA was showing off a reference design using a Micro ATX size board, with only 4-layers, giving NVIDIA even more room to maneuver on price.
Nvidia nForce motherboard reference design – it’s a 4-layer board which helps to reduce the overall cost
There are still a number of questions surrounding nForce that will only be answered once the nForce mobos are out in the field and being used and abused by all. For example, if nForce’s MCP south bridge will be compatible and reliable with the bewildering array of PCI products coming out of Taiwan.
ASUS, Abit, Gigabyte, Mitac, and MSI have committed to nForce
Strategic Relationship with AMD
NVIDIA tightly couples its Northbridge and Southbridge, linking them using AMD’s Hypertransport bus. The result is not so much an integrated chipset solution, but a complete, ready-made platform that goes head to head with anything Intel might do, while adding audio, and communications into the bargain.
Gentle Intel foe, Tony Tamasi, gives the Computex press a lesson in nForce-ment
Tony Tamasi, Nvidia’s Senior Director of Product Management, clearly stated at the company’s nForce press conference that Nvidia has “a strategic relationship with AMD”, and when pressed further about supporting Intel chips he simply said, “We don’t have a license to Intel’s front side bus.” It was obvious from the manner in which Mr. Tomasi answered these questions that Nvidia was not concerned about supporting Intel’s processors with nForce, and was quite willing to go it alone with good buddy AMD.
Combining audio and graphics will let you have your own personal Bubble Guy to dance the night away with on your PC – this from an NVIDIA demo of the power of nForce using a 3D procedural animation front-end for WinAmp
Strategic Relationship with AMD, Continued
This is all the more surprising when one can see the line that connects nForce’s lineage to the Xbox, which uses an Intel Pentium III 733 MHz CPU, not an AMD processor. Yet, Nvidia has successfully managed to dodge the single most damning prospect of partnering with Intel – Intel will keep the biggest profit margins for its CPUs and sacrifice everything else. NVIDIA has developed a strategy that allows the company to do a number of things:
AMD throws its support behind NVIDIA
- nForce is a premium product, even if it weren’t for its audio capability, and integrated communications interfaces, it still delivers GeForce2MX class performance on 3D graphics. NVIDIA can kill its own value 3D-chip products, but they get to go after market share at a bigger level, the PC platform itself.
- Not only does nForce give NVIDIA a premium product, allowing the company to price its chipsets above that of its competitors, but by partnering with AMD, NVIDIA can at least hope to provide an overall platform solution that is faster, and cheaper than comparative products from Intel and VIA. After all, AMD’s processors don’t carry the same sticker price as those of Intel.
- NVIDIA now offers a solution in every segment of the PC business. An nForce motherboard can cross the gamut of system prices from a sub-$1,000, or perhaps even as low as a sub-$500, PC, to a high-end system using one of its own GeForce3 add-in boards instead of the integrated graphics.
Conclusion
Voila! The first unified driver for motherboards – as long as they are nForce mobos
It’s an incredibly gutsy move by Nvidia. The nForce chipset represents the idealism of media processing that was the original remit of the NV1, and something that everyone from Philips and NEC to ATI-acquired Chromatics has tried to tap into. One media processor handling video, 2D, 3D, and communications, driving overall system costs down. nForce isn’t strictly a media processor, but it defines a media processing platform where NVIDIA holds all the cards. Intel could have done the same thing itself, but it has always chosen to emphasize the CPU, for obvious lucrative reasons, while NVIDIA has turned the PC into its own console, with the graphics and audio ruling the roost.
It’s a gutsy move, like we said, but nForce has a way to go to prove itself. First shipments of the chips should be reaching the mobo vendors and PC OEMs by July or August, and the first nForce mobos, and possibly top tier OEM PCs, should hit the shelves in the Fall.
Follow-up by reading Computex: NVIDIA nForces Success In New Market.