Nvidia’s new K8-supporting chip for the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) platform, the Crush K8, will come as a single chip solution with the AGP controller interface integrated into the south bridge chip (media communications processor, MCP). Nvidia demonstrated the product for the first time to certain customers at Comdex Fall 2002.

With AMD incorporating the formerly north bridge-based memory controller into its upcoming K8 processors, the role of the north bridge chip will become rather limited, Drew Henry, Nvidia’s senior director of platform product management said. As a result, Nvidia decided to include the AGP controller interface in the south bridge to shorten motherboard makers’ design time, he added.

Henry said that Nvidia plans to manufacture the chips on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) 0.15-micron process.

Chipset designers VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) and ALi Corporation (formerly Acer Laboratories) are all adopting the more traditional north/south-bridge or graphics-incorporated architectures in their K8-supporting products.

Graphics chip designer ATI Technologies, which also intends to introduce a K8-based chipset, said that its product will use the north/south-bridge architecture to avoid the impact from changes of the graphics specification in the north bridge and thus remain more flexible in marketing strategy and pricing.

Source : DigiTimes