2006-7-4 19:04
Without any doubt, the upcoming Conroe provides lots of performance improvement and is expected to be the favorite of high-end users. To advance in high-end market, instead of AMD based chipset, both ATi and nVidia are going to provide another Intel based chipset.
Lacking of SLi and CrossFire, Intel’s high-end platform has no way to compete with AMD K8 effectively in a long time, so that there are just a few products for Intel from ATi and nVidia. Sources indicated that Intel is leaving the high-end chipset market and open it to ATi and nVidia. Actually, until 2007 Q2, Intel has no plan on the replacement of 975X and Conroe is the hope to change the situation.
For ATi, there are many Intel based products are coming. RD600 targets on high-end user with x16 + x16 CrossFire support, and RD500 is the mainstream version with x16 + x8 CrossFire. Based on X700, RS600 is an IGP featuring AVIVIO. Also RS600 has a pin-to-pin compatible version to RS500 codenamed RC415, and a cheaper version which only supports single channel memory codenamed RC610.
For nVidia, nForce 500 Intel Edition family is the new option. nForce 590 SLi Intel Edition(C19 SLi+ MCP55) supports 2x16 SLi, while nForce 570 Ultra Intel Edition(C19Ultra + MCP51) has no SLi function. C55 chipset is the replacement of C19 northbridge, featuring 1333MHz FSB and DDR2-800. It’s expected to be releasing in 2007 Q1. In addition, Supporting ECC Registered and Memory scrubbing on Single-bit errors, C55 may also appear in the workstation and server market. In addition, it has rumored that nVidia plans to provide Intel based IGP solution, yet it’s not confirmed.
source here
