NVIDIA's Crush on AMD

Computex, the hardware industry's annual trade show in Taiwan, has kicked off with a number of interesting announcements, not least of which is the confirmation we've received that MSI (amongst others) has unveiled its NVIDIA Crush-based offering. You'll remember we spoke about Crush on Friday, the rumoured NVIDIA motherboard chipset. Now known as "nForce", the chip powered a number of boards debuting at the show, including the MSI 6367 and an unnamed ABit board. nForce's specs are still shrouded in some degree of mystery. Back in November we knew that it used DDR memory and a 266MHz front side bus, but we also now know that it features an integrated GeForce 2 MX 3D core, 4x AGP, and that the MSI 6367 also includes onboard ATA100, audio and suspend-to-RAM functionality. Furthermore, nForce is based on the North and South bridge parts NVIDIA designed for the Microsoft Xbox, and comes in two variants, 11 and 12 for two separate North bridge (IGP) components, 64-bit and 128-bit. A launch party is scheduled for tonight on HMS Belfast, while the chip mops up jaws at Computex. Amusing, is it not, that NVIDIA would choose a battleship (decommissioned in 1971 fact fans) from which to launch its latest market-destroying product. Tonight, Nvidia is expected to unveil the nForce Platform Processing Architecture comprising an Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) and a Media and Communications Processor (MCP). The IGP integrates the GeForce 2 MX core with 64-bit and 128-bit variants, and the MCP chip integrates audio, and according to The Register also comes in two variants, one supporting Dolby Digital sound, and one not. Although we've heard that there will be two nForce setups, the above factoid points to a possible four combinations. The onboard sound chip provides AC97 sound with 256 voices in hardware but also six channel Dolby Surround. We'll know for sure this evening. Related Feature - Athlon roundup