Good Graphics, Cheaper Prices
It’s not like we didn’t know NVIDIA was prepping integrated graphics for Intel CPUs. In fact, the chips are long overdue.
There’s nowhere to go but up when you are at the bottom. Jon Peddie reports that NVIDIA has less than 1% of the chipset market for Intel systems. NVIDIA accordingly has “big market potential”.
It appears that the new core logic from NVIDIA will work with CPUs based on the Core microarchitecture. This includes the brands Core 2, Pentium, and Celeron. Brand names are not descriptive of technology and can span multiple generations of technologies.
The codenames, which we are not supposed to use anymore but which nevertheless match the technology the new MCPs appear to be designed for, are Conroe and Wolfdale. Wolfdale is the Penryn derivative of Conroe, which was the original Core 2 microprocessor for the desktop. At this point, Intel quad-core does not appear to fit within the price envelopes that these NVIDIA chipsets target.
NVIDIA appears to be aiming at low-end desktops, which is a bit unusual, since the company tends to target high-end systems with their higher profit margins.
CPU and graphics chip makers today are striving for good graphics, “cheaper prices”.