http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20037

Nforce 5 is two chip design

C19 + MCP04 connected with Hypertransport


By Fuad Abazovic: Friday 03 December 2004, 14:10

WE LEARNED that the next generation Intel Nforce chipset comes in a two chip combo. Nvidia usually stuck to one chip design but I guess it ran out of space with its Nforce 5 Pentium 4 silicon. Nvidia managed to place all of its AMD Nforce chipsets on one chip.
We can now confirm that Nvidia's Pentium 4 chipset has support for two PCIe graphic ports. Yes, it's SLI compliant and that supports DDR 2 memory. It will be the first Pentium 4 SLI chipset. The only chipset to fight Nforce 5 is ATI's own SLI chipset that is due to arrive in Q2 2005.

These two chips are supposedly interconnected with AMD Hypertransport marchitecture and that definitely comes as a huge surprise to us. An Intel chipset interconnected with AMD marchitecture - that's the kind of cooperation that we would like to see more of in the industry.

Nvidia was a very early joiner of the AMD Hypertransport organisation, of course.

We will have some more exact details soon. µ

* DIGITIMES reports that Intel and Nvidia have struck a deal in which the former bundles its own motherboards with Nvidia PCI Express graphics cards.