NVIDIA MCP79 for VIA CPUs; Intel P45/G45 delayed(?)
Monday 31st March 2008, 09:30:00 AM, written by Arun
It is extremely difficult to determine when the NVIDIA-VIA agreement was made based on this rumour and MCP79's schedule; based on our information, G98/MCP78/MCP79's schedules have been blown massively off course (the delay's magnitude is NV30-like), as, just like C73 (the 790i SPP), they have required a full silicon respin. Therefore NVIDIA will be suffering what's effectively a completely new tape-out with all the associated costs.
Given this silicon respin, it is possible that the original tape-out did not support VIA's Isaiah processor and that this was opportunistically added in the new revision. As a reminder, VIA uses their own proprietary V4 Bus which is pin-compatible with the Pentium M's FSB, but the electrical signaling is different. So it really shouldn't be too hard to get this to work in theory (in practice, who knows).
Alternatively, it isn't clear which processes the two MCP79 tapeouts were on; it seems to be 65nm for the first one at the very least. Assuming that the second one is also 65nm, it could be that there will be a third tape-out on 55nm with fundamentally the same RTL which will support VIA's V4 Bus.
Either way, the deal makes perfect sense for both parties: it's a viable combination for the low-end consumer market at HP for example, and it streamlines a potential merger in the future. So as we said in the introductory paragraph, the real question in our mind is whether NVIDIA made a similar deal with Montalvo and our expectation would be that they did.
It is also rumoured that G45/P45 (they are actually the same chip it seems; last-gen, it was P35/G33 which were the same chip, and also P33/G31 apparently) have been delayed to mid-June. And, well, not everyone seems to agree on that estimate. Either way, it looks like G45/P45 will be released in the same rough timeframe as MCP79.
MCP79 is likely a very important component for NVIDIA, as just like the C55 (680i/650i SPP) helped make the G80 launch especially successful, they likely have similar plans for MCP79 and GT200: it is the first NVIDIA chipset for Intel platforms with support for HybridPower, which should be especially appealing (if not necessary in some people's minds) for GT200.
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