nForce is a

motherboard A motherboard, also called a mainboard, a system board, a logic board, and informally a mobo (see #Nomenclature, "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It ho ...

chipset In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components on one or more integrated circuits that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. The chipset is usually found on the motherboard of computers. Chips ...

created by

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

originally for

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Athlon AMD Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86, x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by AMD, Advanced Micro Devices. The original Athlon (now called Athlon Classic) was the first seventh-generation x86 processor a ...

and

Duron Duron is a line of budget x86-compatible microprocessors manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices, AMD and released on June 19, 2000. Duron was intended to be a lower-cost offering to complement AMD's then mainstream performance Athlon process ...

, with later revisions also supporting contemporary

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

processors. The chipset shipped in 3 varieties; 220, 415, and 420. 220 and 420 are very similar with each having the integrated

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

, but the 220 only has a single channel of memory available whereas 420 has the 128-bit TwinBank design. The 415 variant again has the dual-channel memory interface, but has no integrated graphics.

Innovations

Dual channel & GeForce2 MX IGP

The nForce chipset introduced a dual-channel memory controller to the mainstream motherboard market, doubling theoretical throughput, and offering very competitive performance most especially in workstation class benchmarks. This dual-channel design was deemed necessary largely because of the added integrated GeForce 2 MX class video hardware. For the relatively fast integrated graphics processor (IGP) to have adequate memory bandwidth it needed more than to simply share a single memory channel with the Athlon XP CPU.

Ethernet and DASP

Nvidia also touted both their built-in

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

controller, and a new memory prefetch mechanism called the Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Pre-Processor (DASP). The Nvidia-built Ethernet controller was supposedly capable of reducing CPU overhead while being also very fast. The DASP unit helped reduce memory latency for the main CPU by prefetching often needed data, or data that the DASP predicted the CPU would need. Many considered it somewhat an advanced Level 3

cache Cache, caching, or caché may refer to: Science and technology * Cache (computing), a technique used in computer storage for easier data access * Cache (biology) or hoarding, a food storing behavior of animals * Cache (archaeology), artifacts p ...

device.

nForce APU (SoundStorm)

Nvidia debuted their advanced NVAPU audio solution, branded SoundStorm, on the nForce MCP-D southbridge chip. It is the same as the audio processor in the

Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand that consists of four main home video game console lines, as well as application software, applications (games), the streaming media, streaming service Xbox Cloud Gaming, and online services such as the Xbox networ ...

chipset and supports many hardware-accelerated 2D/3D audio channels and advanced HRTF 3D

audio spatialization Spatial music is composed music that intentionally exploits sound localization. Though present in Western music from biblical times in the form of the antiphon, as a component specific to new musical techniques the concept of spatial music (''Raumm ...

provided largely by

Sensaura Sensaura Ltd., a division of Creative Technology, was a company that provided 3D audio effect technology for the interactive entertainment industry. Sensaura technology was shipped on more than 24 million game consoles and 150 million PCs (on soun ...

. It also has a built-in processor for encoding computer audio into a

Dolby Digital Live Dolby Digital, originally synonymous with #Dolby AC-3, Dolby AC-3 (see below), is the name for a family of audio compression (data), audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. Called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1995 in film, ...

signal for external receivers to decode into a 5.1-channel audio spread. With its hardware acceleration, the difference in CPU usage when running popular multimedia applications was as much as 10-20%, potentially allowing faster performance in programs that are limited by the system CPU.

Performance and problems

The original nForce chipset was let down by patchy driver support and less than optimal hardware design. Performance of the dual-channel memory controller and "DASP" did not greatly surpass the

VIA Technologies VIA Technologies, Inc. () is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory. It was once the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, ...

KT266A chipset that was usually as fast and cheaper. The optimized

parallel ATA Parallel ATA (PATA), originally , also known as Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and C ...

driver support was introduced and then withdrawn after hardware incompatibilities showed up, and the much heralded

SoundStorm SoundStorm is a brand by Nvidia referring to a SIP block integrating 5.1 surround sound technology found on the die of their nForce and nForce2 chipsets for x86 CPUs. It is also the name of a certification to be obtained from Nvidia when com ...

audio was seen to crackle under heavily loaded scenarios. In fact, the ATA driver would remain an issue at least into the life of

nForce4 The nForce4 is a motherboard chipset released by Nvidia in October 2004. The chipset supports AMD 64-bit processors (Socket 939, Socket AM2 and Socket 754) and Intel Pentium 4 LGA 775 processors. Models nForce4/nForce4-4x nForce4 is the second ...

where it was still known to cause problems with some

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

s and

optical drive In computing, an optical disc drive (ODD) is a disk drive, disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some driv ...

s .

References

External links

Nvidia's nForce product page

* : nForce chipset community forum/website
Anandtech: Nvidia nForce Computex 2001 Preview

Anandtech: Nvidia's nForce 420/220: It's finally here
{{Nvidia chipsets Nvidia chipsets zh:NVIDIA nForce