Industry Update - Q2-2005: Chipset wars, AMD's growing market share and more...
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 13, 2005 4:34 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
The Multi-GPU Battle: ATI vs. NVIDIA
ATI's recent entry into the multi-GPU market with CrossFire has created competition in both price and performance aspects of high end AMD and Intel chipsets.ATI continues to have problems with their South Bridges, and thus, they are turning to ULi to supply the South Bridges for motherboard designs based on their new multi-GPU chipset. ATI's closest partners are currently beta-testing their new South Bridge, but none of them have any confidence in ATI's ability to bring their South Bridges to market in time. While they are all ready to use ULi based South Bridges if necessary, in order to keep ATI happy, they are continuing to work with ATI's South Bridge in their designs.
Given the lack of interest in any of ATI's previous chipsets, ATI knows that in order to get CrossFire off the ground with any sort of success, they will need some pretty powerful partners in the Taiwanese market.
Thus, ATI is talking to VIA and SiS to license out their multi-GPU technology so that you will be able to purchase a motherboard based on an ATI, VIA or SiS chipset and be able to run ATI graphics cards in multi-GPU modes. VIA is particularly interested in this partnership as they aren't the biggest fans of NVIDIA at this point.
First availability of ATI's CrossFire chipsets won't be until July or August time frame from what we're hearing.
NVIDIA is very curious about ATI's CrossFire, as it will mark the end of NVIDIA's exclusivity on multi-GPU platforms. In order to help expand the SLI market, NVIDIA appears to be ready to drop the price of their nForce4 SLI chipset. While currently priced at around $80, the chipset will drop in price to close to $40 later this year. The goal is to enable SLI motherboards to be priced at $100 or less. We have even heard that some very aggressive motherboard manufacturers are looking to offer sub-$80 nForce4 SLI motherboards by the end of this year.
At $80, it would be senseless not to buy a SLI motherboard, which is exactly what NVIDIA wants.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
45 Comments
View All Comments
snedzad - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
No, it won't. KT880 chipset is for K7 (socket A) processors. You probably thought about K8T800 chipset, that doesn't support 939 socket. Only K8T800Pro and K8T890 are supporting 939 and none of them dual core. Even a bios update won't help. Via works on revision of the chipset that should allow dual core CPUs.xsilver - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Will the kt880 chipset support dual core? (asus a8v, abit av8 etc...)many of us owners would like to know :)
Viditor - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Nehemoth - I'm pretty sure that's not an official roadmap. It looks like an educated guess on VR Zone's part as to what's happening based on the analyst meeting from Friday.One thing they missed was the mobile sector. At the meeting, AMD said they were coming out with dual core Turions next year as well...
One other thing I think they might have wrong is the 65nm parts not coming out till 2007, though they didn't list anything for H2 06...
Viditor - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
"You can go to HP or Compaq and order a Turion laptop right now. So they are out there, just not pushed real hard right now"That's true, but notice that they only have one Turion designed notebook...
This was a very late arrival and it's not very well integrated. You can say there aren't many models because it's not being pushed, or go the other way and say it's not being pushed because there aren't many models...
It is a fact that unless a design is locked in by January, you will have very few models available for that year...
Marlin1975 - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
You can go to HP or Compaq and order a Turion laptop right now. So they are out there, just not pushed real hard right now.knitecrow - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
I love these industry update articlesNehemoth - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
If you go herehttp://www.vr-zone.com/?i=2328&s=1
Are The Manila And Windsor Cores
and see the new AMD roadmap, you can see the new core with integrated graphic..
Viditor - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
ElMoIsEviL - "marketshare figures taken from Mercury show results that differ greatly from these"Marketshare numbers from Mercury show the previous quarter...
Beenthere - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
Industry figures can be twisted to say whatever you want them to say and they are typically 3-6 months behind current sales. With AMD selling more desktop CPUs than Intel over the past several quarters and Mobo production being ahead of sales, you can be pretty certain AMD's sales and market share gains are very real. Even Intel's 10Q's show major drops in CPU sales and Intel is actually BUYING all the sales they are getting. If the shift is from 80/20 to 60/40 or 50/50 it's still a Helleva coup for AMD and the hand writing is on the wall for Intel, who's arrogance got the better of them.As for SLI - it's a technology few need and only enthusiasts will pay thru the nose for. Even if SLI Mobos get down to $100 which they will, you still need two over-priced graphics cards to use SLI. Even power PC users don't need SLI and few consumers will throw good money away like gamers do.
yacoub - Monday, June 13, 2005 - link
So is that actually a saying in Taiwan or just creative journalistic license? ;)