Introduction
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NVIDIA launched this week their new chipset family with integrated graphics (a.k.a. “on-board video”). NVIDIA’s goal is to try to repeat the success they have on the discrete graphics motherboard market. To put things into perspective, AMD motherboard market is 60% discrete and 40% integrated graphics. From this 60% market, NVIDIA has 90% of it with their nForce chipset family.
For AMD platform, NVIDIA usually uses the single chip approach, where both north bridge and south bridge are integrated into one chip, as you can see in Figure 1.
Figure 1: nForce 4 architecture.
For the new chipsets with integrated graphics, NVIDIA decided to use two chips. The north bridge chip is being called “GeForce” and the south bridge chip is being called “nForce”, as you can see in Figure 2.
Figure 2: GeForce 6100 and nForce 400 family architecture.
If you want to learn more about chipset architecture, we recommend you to read our tutorial Everything You Need to Know About Chipsets.