14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA slowly became one of the most important players on the CPU chipset market and its upcoming MCP72 single-processor chipset is willing to consolidate its position. The MCP72 will be NVIDIA?s first HyperTransport 3.0 (HT3) compatible chipset and a successor to the current nForce 500-series MCP and the soon-to-be-released MCP68 chipsets. MCP72 will support the current AMD AM2 socket, as well as the highly anticipated HT3 enabled AM2+, which will accommodate AMD?s Athlon 64 Agena and Opteron Budapest quad-core processors.
AMD?s Budapest is the codename for the upcoming native quad-core Opteron 1000 series CPUs. Budapest will still be compatible with the current AM2 platform, supporting both HyperTransport 1.0 motherboards and HyperTransport 3.0 future motherboards. The Budapest-based Opteron 1000 series are said to integrate 4x512KB of L2 cache, 2MB of L3 and support for AMD-V technology, which will also be featured by the Opteron 8000 and 2000 series based on the Barcelona core. When we think about AMD server-class CPUs, we immediately relate these to registered memory modules. However, AMD thought that the high-end Opteron 1000-series processors could benefit from unregistered DDR2-800 memory modules.
Although NVIDIA designed the current nForce 500 series as a dual-chip solution, the upcoming MCP72 is presented as a single-chip solution similar to the previous nForce 3-series and early nForce 4-series. The single-chip design makes for a smaller footprint and reduced power consumption. Moreover, the MCP72 is considered to be NVIDIA?s first PCIe 2.0 equipped chipset, making it ideal for the next-generation PCIe peripherals and graphics cards. Other important features include support for six SATA 3.0Gbps and dual Gigabit Ethernet, similar to what the current nForce 500-series offers.
The MCP72 could come in SLI and Ultra flavors, as well. The new chipset is expected to arrive as soon as AMD?s Agena and Budapest quad-core processors are released, namely Q4 2007.