NVIDIA Planning New AMD-Supporting Chipset

Earlier this year, a number of rumors indicated that the Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA was expected to announce that it would quit its chipset business as it intended to concentrate on its upcoming graphics card lineup. The rumors were dismissed by the company quite rapidly, but kept on going for some time, after that. However, it now appears that some new (leaked) details indicate that NVIDIA is planning some new AMD-supporting chipsets that are set to debut sometime in the first quarter of 2009. 

Now, according to a recent article on expreview, the upcoming chipset, which is said to be dubbed MCP82, will replace the manufacturer's current MCP72 model. The new chipset will support the current AM2 and AM2+ sockets, but it will also deliver support for the next AM3-enabled processors, which will feature DDR3 support.

Aside from that, the new NVIDIA chipset is built to support DirectX 10 and Hybrid SLI and provide 7.1-channel Audio, PureVideo HD video and HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs. It comes with an HT3 FSB, it has 6 SATA ports with RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 support, Gigabit Ethernet and up to 12 USB ports.

According to expreview, there are going to be two versions of said chipset, differing in terms of PCI Express specifications and SLI support. The first version is going to allow 3-way SLI configurations with 1 PCI Express X16 and two PCI Express X8, while the second one is going to deliver 2-way SLI support with two PCI Express X8.

Currently, these are the only available details and it appears users should be expecting the new boards sometime in Q1 2009, as they are set to enter production stage in January. The news confirms that not only that NVIDIA isn't going to exit the chipset market, but it is also planning to release new products to support upcoming technologies.