We learned a while ago that the Santa Clara graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA plans entering the netbook market and that it would do so by providing a chipset for the widely known Intel Atom processor. Back then, the move was expected to be a rather far in the future one, but now it seems that the green company has already stepped on it and that the chipset is under development as we speak.

According to the latest news on the Web, NVIDIA is on its way to come to the market with a MCP7A chipset that supports the low-power Intel chip. Moreover, the chipset is expected to be fully featured as to meet the requirements of the market segment it addresses. The MCP7A is said to feature not only integrated GeForce graphics and support for external graphics, but also to include support for 2-way NVIDIA SLI.

It seems that the chipset will pack a root complex allowing users to connect to two discrete graphics devices with 8 PCI-Express lanes each. This feature is something new and rather unusual for a low-power machine like a netbook, yet it sounds more than appealing.

The specifications list for the NVIDIA MCP7A shows that the chipset will feature support for PC2-6400 memory standard, sporting up to four DIMM slots. In addition, it includes six SATA II channels, twelve USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and IEEE 1394, and HD Audio. The essential features of the chipset point towards the fact that any notebook including it will be able to offer more than basic Internet browsing capabilities.

According to the same news, NVIDIA may also be preparing a MCP79 chipset for pico-ATX and SFF platforms. This part is said to come with a single DDR3 memory channel along with integrated GeForce graphics with DVI-D and HDMI support.