A hell of a monster that seems to kick in sooner than expected

Feb 18, 2008 15:09 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia has never excelled in elaborating on its chipset roadmap, and sometimes, it seems that the confusion is deliberately inflicted. Rumor has it that Nvidia's response to the AMD RS780M chipset, the MCP77 mobile chipset, will come factory-default with 22xPCIe lanes and 15xUSB ports. Top all of that, the chipset will arrive earlier than expected: in March.

The rumors that have emerged until now claimed that the MCP78 would only have 19 PCI Express lanes, of which only 18 would be available in SLI chipsets (because of the four links). Some other tech websites claimed that MCP79, also known as MCP7A (the Intel-ready chipset), would sport 20 PCI Express lanes. Both chipsets were reported to come with 12 USB ports only.

If the rumors prove to be true, it means that the MCP77M chipset will have two stock keeping units (SKU): the first one will provide support for 15 USB ports and 22 PCI-Express lanes, while the second will only support 10 USB ports and 20 PCI-Express lanes. The first SKU will come with support for Hybrid SLI and PureVideo HD, while the latter will not. In order to furthermore confuse the user, the last year reports claimed that MCP67 and MCP68 were in fact two names for a single chip with identical features.

Other websites point that Nvidia is cooking a MCP7C chipset for Intel platforms that is scheduled for release at some point in August. The alleged chipset is "known" to have a 64-bit memory bus, yet there is no further documentation regarding its specifications, and it might not even exist. And, if we are about to find out the mystery behind the MCP78/MCP77 chipsets in a short while, the MCP7C will stay in its lair for quite some time.

On top of all that, there are the infernal delays. For instance, the MCP78 has been delayed so many times already that we don't even bother to inform ourselves regarding another release date.