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Question of the Day: Will you be subscribing to the new Disney+ R49 streaming package?
nforce stil in market?
- Thread starter Flame
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Progenix Oj101
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Not for ages, NVIDIA left the chipset business in 2009 with the nForce 980 for the Phenom 2.
Fulcrum29
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Progenix Oj101
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Fulcrum29
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Progenix Oj101
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They're as good as gone. They were due to resume the following year, which is now almost half a decade ago; I don't have a reference to that right now but they were waiting for a court case to finish in 2010 before they continued. It was also an Intel issue, nothing stopped them from continuing with AMD chipsets. I don't think we'll ever see another x86 chipset from them, I reckon they'll focus on the ARM SoC market with their Tegra lineup.
CataclysmZA
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If you're in China, you can still buy refurbs in retail boxes with a year's warranty.
Nope. Both Intel and AMD have chipsets that are far more capable today and better supported in drivers.
The catalyst for the move was that Intel didn't want to pay the license fees for certification to allow SLI on X58 chipsets, because it slowed their progress down and slowed partner's progress down with getting their boards to market. The gamble paid off and eventually Nvidia came to the table with a better offer starting with the P55 chipsets. Prior to that, Intel had started making their chipsets in-house instead of licensing other vendors to make their own (VIA with S3, etc), squeezing Nvidia out of the high-end market.
nForce lives on in the Nvidia Optimus hardware, as some ideas and tricks got ported over to help with graphics switching, as well as the Tegra chipsets prior to Tegra K1.
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CataclysmZA
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It was basically an all-in-one solution for AMD processors when it started out. Nvidia offered quite a lot of stuff off of one package with the Nforce, including Ethernet, hardware audio processing, a dual-channel memory controller and a method to speed up the IGP slot though taking the chipset lanes reserved for the second memory controller and using them to deliver more bandwidth to the GPU.
It was also the best way to get SLI working on AMD motherboards and later Intel boards starting with LGA775 and the Pentium 4 chips. Each iteration of the chip added in new stuff and more PCI-Express lanes. Everything that Nvidia learned along the way went into Tegra eventually. By the time the 790i SLI popped out in 2008, they were doing some really neat stuff with overclocking and routing PCI-E lanes for better efficiency.
If Intel had not blocked Nvidia with the X58 chipset issues and continued to license their technology, they'd be far ahead in the game and would have segmented the market cleanly, leaving AMD struggling to get motherboard vendors to use theirs or Intel's chipets and certify their boards for Crossfire.
