Computex 2002 Day 2: ATI's R300, nForce2 & XScale PDAs

NVIDIA's Take on Hammer w/ Integrated Graphics

With our first day of Computex coverage we pointed out that NVIDIA's CK8 solution did not make use of an on-board frame buffer for the integrated graphics. We asked NVIDIA about this today and their response was that an on-board frame buffer completely kills the reasoning behind an integrated graphics solution which is to reduce cost. NVIDIA only commented that they had their best core logic engineers (many of which were hired from Intel according to NVIDIA) working with AMD on the best way to hide memory access latencies with the on-die Hammer memory controller.

NVIDIA did add that they don't see the Hammer nForce solution being a serious volume product until the second half of next year and thus they weren't too concerned with the performance of the integrated graphics this early in the game.

2 SATA + 1 ATA133

Yesterday we pointed out an interesting combination of three ATA-133 channels on Gigabyte's Hammer motherboard and wondered why the odd number of connectors on the board; today we were able to find out.

Serial ATA Channels to the left and right of the Promise chip & 1 ATA-133 Connector

Until Intel's Springdale chipset is launched, the only way of getting Serial ATA support on a motherboard is through an external controller. One of the controllers that seems to be quite popular among motherboard manufacturers today is the Promise PDC20376. This particular controller offers two Serial ATA ports as well as a single ATA-133 channel which is why a number of motherboards at Computex feature three ATA-133 channels. The controller also allows for RAID setups using one or more of the channels (Serial ATA or ATA-133) driven by the Promise chip.

V-Link or HyperTransport?

While visiting DFI we noticed that they had a Hammer board design with an AMD AGP 8X controller but with an ALi South Bridge. When we asked them why they chose the odd combination we realized something we hadn't thought of before - motherboard manufacturers won't be able to use VIA South Bridges with AMD AGP controllers for Hammer. The reason being that AMD's chipset uses HyperTransport to connect all of the chips while VIA uses their own V-Link architecture which isn't compatible with HyperTransport.

Click to Enlarge

ALi however does use HyperTransport (as does NVIDIA) and thus there may be some incentive for motherboard manufacturers to look elsewhere outside of VIA for Hammer South Bridge solutions.