Nforce 2 cutting edge, or cutting corners?

NVIDIA WILL TAKE THE wraps off its Crush 18 chipset this week, possibly as early as today, if the industry source-inspired speculations of a number of sites is anything to go by. We've a hunch the launch will be sooner rather than later, but whenever Nvidia does spill the beans about nForce 2 - it doesn't take a genius to figure the name out - by all accounts it will be an impressive product.

Just look at what's leaked out so far: integrated GeForce 4 MX graphics along with support for AGP 8x graphics cards; Firewire - as the IEEE 1394 will now be branding the consumer electronics connectivity technology - and USB 2.0; an ATA/133 interface; high-speed HyperTransport; an extension of the original nForce's dual memory controller technology, aka TwinBank, that will support DDR 400 (if, of course, you can get hold of the stuff - not much chance of that for a wee while, our memory business sources tell us); asynchronous memory and frontside bus clocking; and dual Ethernet controllers.

Of course, there are some omissions: we'd have liked to have seen support for wireless networking on the chipset's feature list, for example. Perhaps Nvidia will surprise us, but we suspect not. But since Intel has committed itself to supporting not only 802.11b but Bluetooth in its Pentium 4 chipsets, we had hoped Nvidia, which is clearly trying to position itself at the cutting edge of AMD chipset design, would have wanted to take the lead here too.

Building in two Ethernet controllers will allow an nForce 2-equipped PC to operate as an Internet gateway, tying in a local network to a single broadband connection. Plenty of users are doing that already, but while some chose to add an extra Ethernet card, most opt for a wireless base-station in order to hook up all those other PCs without the hassle of laying down cable. It's how I'm able to write this from my sun-splashed back deck, chilled beer by my side. Isn't technology wonderful?

Despite the absence of wireless, AMD should be pleased with nForce 2, since it will clearly give Athlon XP and, looking ahead a little way, Hammer-based Athlons, a powerful platform to attack the high-end consumer market. That business may be depressed now, but by all accounts, nForce 2 will ship in a timeframe to appeal to those customers when they start buying again.

And perhaps AMD won't be the only chip maker chuffed by Nvidia's efforts. While we don't think rumours that Apple is about to ditch PowerPC for Athlon hold much water, the Mac maker's support for HyperTransport and its keenness on Firewire (it developed the standard, for Steve's sake), not to mention being pals with Nvidia, we wonder if nForce 2 technology might not make its way into the iMac line, coincidentally due to be updated this week too.

From what we know of nForce 2 - or however Nvidia chooses to brand Crush 18 - it's certainly geared toward the home computer as digital hub concept that Apple's been rattling on about for some time. It would boost the iMac's system and graphics performance rather nicely too - more so than the expected clock speed hike up to 800 and 933MHz from 700 and 800MHz - can achieve alone. You can argue that clock-for-clock PowerPC is faster than x86 CPUs, but however you look at it, the iMac's 100MHz system bus and PC-100 SDRAM are well out of date. It's definitely time for DDR, and nForce 2 would certainly allow Apple to adopt that technology quickly and easily.

Assuming, that is, Nvidia prices nForce 2 right. So far no one outside Nvidia has published any indication of what the chipset's components might cost. The original version was pricey, and the high-end functions highlighted by the rumour sites suggest that nForce 2 isn't going to be bargain basement either. If that's the case, it may be some time before the chipset appears in systems most folk can afford, recession or no. µ

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See Also
Nforce 2 to beat Via's DDR 400 by 20%