Nvidia's Crush K8S to tape out in July

NVIDIA ROADMAPS SEEN by the INQUIRER at a London hostelry show the firm is not only augmenting its Nforce 2 chipset, as reported here earlier, but is almost ready to tape out its Crush K8S in July.

And the same roadmaps we saw show, as expected, that its Crush K8 and Crush K8 Pro are ready for production.

Further, it appears that PCI Express Athlon64 chipsets from Nvidia will sample as early as the fourth quarter this year. While it will sample a wholly re-designed GeForce FX graphics core for the Crush K8 family in the fourth quarter of this year.

Crush K8 supports AGP 8X, USB 2, three ATA-133, NV Raid, NV Ethernet, PCI 2.3, AC 97 and hypertension.

And Crush K8S is similar apart from its support S-ATA(n), and Nvidia's Gigabit Ethernet.

The Crush K8S is also a single chip design, and is pun [surely pin, Ed.] compatible with the original Crush K8.

Nvidia will go into full mass production of the former chip in July. The schedule for the K8S means the A01 tape out will be in July, customers will get samples in August, production samples will be available in October, and mass production in November, if all goes well.

This suggests that Crush K8S motherboards for Opterons won't appear until late September, with Athlon 64 support in November.

Nvidia has already announced its Nforce 3 Professional chipset for the AMD Opteron. This is optimised for Nvidia Quadro workstation graphics and aimed, as the name implies, for the professional market. Does this mean there will be an Nforce 3 Amateur?

Nforce 3 Professional, is being positioned as an "enthusiast's solution", with a 128-bit dual channel memory design, so perhaps Nvidia should rename it Nforce 3 Amateur.

Then, of course, the rules will change all over again, because in the second half of this year and most of next, PCI Express rulez, and we'll see Nvidia segment the market into enthusiast, performance and mainstream.

Nvidia will produce a Crush 3GIO (PCI-Express) chip to sample in the fourth quarter of this year, while it will sample the CrushK8-04 at the end of this year, so that it can include a PCI-Express connection and GeForce FX graphics, provisionally called Crush K8G3 right now. µ