Thursday, March 06, 2003

Technical details of the nForce2

Nvidia's goal in releasing the nForce2, has been to establish a stable place for themselves as a manufacturer of motherboards. To that goal, they developped two new chipsets.

The first was the nForce2 SPP (System Platform Processor)

The nForce2 is targetted primarily at high-end systems. The SPP was designed, from start to finish, as a "pure" chipset. In other words, it was designed without an integrated graphics card in order to speed-up execution time and throughput.

A number of other important design changes were also made by nVidia to meet that goal.

First, the SPP was given two independant memory bus controllers in order to reduce memory latency. The two seperate controllers gave the nForce an immediate advantage over other contemporaty chipsets, because it allowed latency to be reduced by upto one half. The two memory controllers also provide the nForce2 with a 128-bit channel to main-memory, which, depending on the speed of the memory installed, can result in anything from 4.2GB/sec to 6.4GB/sec in maximum bandwidth. The amount of memory supported by the nForce2 was also effectively doubled from 1.5GB to 3.0GB.

Second, the SPP also includes a "Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Preprocessor" ("DASP"). The DASP takes the time to determine, in advance, exactly what data will be needed by the system in the near future, and deliver it more quickly. If handled properly, this kind of speculative processing can greatly increase the performance of a system by decreasing the amount of time that's spent waiting for data to be sent down the pipe.

One of the most important aspects of the nForce2, though, is its support for standards. Not only can it work with DDR266, DDR333, and DDR400 memory -- by using the asnchronos memory option in the BIOS, the nForce2 can also boast that it officially supports 8X AGP. Support for the standard on AMD platforms was first tried by nVidia, with their KT400 chipset, but it seems to have taken nVidia to get everything humming along nicely.

The first generation of the nForce also introduced us to the term "IGP". Essentially, the IGP was an nVidia graphics card that had been integrated ito the nForce Northbridge. In the newest revision, nVidia has increased the performance of the IGP to levels similar to that of the GeForce4 MX400.

In fact, the IGP has all the markings of the GeForce4 MX400, with a little extra "oomph". This will, for instance, that "Accuview" technology will be included in an integrated graphics card, along with nVidia's "VPE" technology.

The chip's "nView" technology, another feature included in the nForce2 IGP, also allows the chipset to handle various outgoing video signals, including TV-out, and HDTV-out. The IGP itself allows motherboard manufacturers to offer two VGA ports to users, or a single VGA port combined with TV-out. While DVI ports are not offered, mobo makers can easily make them available through the use of a small raiser card that can plug into the AGP port. With the advent of the nForce2, the new IGP even has bandwidth to spare: the 8X AGP port is connected to the rest of the system via an 800MB/sec Hypertransport bus.

The release of the nForce2 also included the release of a new MCP, which the company has dubbed the "MCP-t", to distinguish it from the original nForce MCP, which will now be relegated to entry level system configurations.

The MCP-t has alot in common with its predecessor. For instance, it uses the same audio unit as the original nForce -- the same one that's used by Microsoft's Xbox console -- which supports Dolby Digital AC-3 and up to 256 different voices. That's not to say that there's nothing new under the hood. First off, twin 10/100Base-T Ethernet cards from nVidia and 3Com have been added, which makes it easy to share an Internet connection, or set-up a simple home network. The MCP-t also has its share of ports: it supports upto six USB 2.0 ports, and three Firewire ports. Last, but not least, ATA133 support has been added to round things out.

For less costly applications, nVidia offers the MCP. Like its big brother, the MCP supports USB 1.1 and 2.0, as well as ATA133. Unlike the former, only one network card is included, and audio support comes in the form of a simple AC'97 unit. One of the more compelling features from a manufacturer's standpoint, however, is compatibility: the MCP-t and the MCP are interchangable, which makes it easier to develop similar products with different feature sets.

Below, we've included two images taken from nVidia's press documentation that demonstrate different suggested configurations.

Next: Technical details of the mainboard

Asus A7N8X