Release 2,2GHz Northwood halverwege vierde kwartaal

If you ask NVIDIA why there ain't a Pentium III or Pentium 4 version of the chipset, they answer with a blatant "we don't have an Intel front side bus license'. I doubt that NVIDIA is particularly unhappy with this situation. AMD is a much easier to handle partner than heavyweight Intel. However, nForce is now putting NVIDIA in a completely new and much more threatening league. Intel can only hope to come up with something competitive to nForce, because otherwise it will lose even more customers than it already has.

Nvidia-Intel cuddly cuddly

SNAP, SNIP and SNORUM
By Mike Magee, 7 June 2001 10.00 BST

WE QUIZZED THE ENGINEER at the Intel gig yesterday about the Nvidia and AMD announcements and asked him whether INTC would have any of that good stuf.

His reply was interesting, although a little fuzzy on details, but he was positive enough for us to invent a new acronym called SNIP (the Strategic Nvidia Intel Partnership). All we need now is for Rambus and Nvidia to get pally and we shall have SNIP, SNAP and SNORUM.

Of course, Intel designed the base Xbox, which uses Nvidia tech, and so the boys and girls have already talked to each other about all of this stuff heaps before.

He said the following: "Nvidia has been very supportive of us and have demoed on the Pentium 4 platform."

OK. The more interesting bit: "Nvidia will want to keep their options open" and not be totally in AMD's embrace.

Alright. The most interesting bit. Intel and Nvidia are actually already cooperating on next generation products and will bring some things out together.

This doesn't prejudice Intel's "special relationship" with ATI.

So unless Intel's bluffing, AMD's window of opportunity with all of that stuff that debuted at Computex earlier this week may be not as wide open as it wishes.

Support Of Intel Processors?
Another impressive fact is that nForce in its current version is actually not only supporting AMD processors. In actual fact you can just as well run Intel's Pentium III with it and be happy, which might not be quite as surprising if you remember nForce's close family bands to the Microsoft's upcoming Xbox, which, as we know, will be powered by Intel's Pentium III processor. We are not supposed to know about this, because Intel turned down NVIDIA's request for a front side bus license for its illustrious Pentium-line. So far about the rumor about NVIDIA's pro-active decision to build a strategic partnership with AMD. It looks more as if the guys didn't have a choice. Time will tell if Intel made the right decision for a change. We have our doubts.