Rumour control: Nvidia making VIA Nano chipset

Posted at: 3:57am 9th June 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Nvidia and VIA kiss at Mini-ITX 2.0 launch, while rumours surface about a forthcoming nForce chipset for VIA CPUs

Shortly after officially announcing its first nForce chipset for AMD CPUs for several years, many rumours are now circulating about Nvidia developing an nForce chipset for VIA’s new Nano CPU.

Taiwanese tech site DigiTimes claims to have spoken to PC vendors who say that the new MCP79 chipset will support a 1,333MHz front side bus, and will also feature integrated DirectX 10 graphics. The site even has a timeframe of the first quarter of 2009 for the launch date.

Rumours about an nForce chipset that supports VIA’s Isaiah architecture have been doing the rounds for a few months, but they’ve now been given more credence because of Nvidia’s presence at the launch of VIA’s Mini-ITX 2.0 launch. Nvidia’s general manager of its MCP business, Drew Henry, was there, and HKEPC even photographed him receiving a big kiss on the forehead from VIA’s special assistant to the president, Timothy Chen (see below).

Henry didn’t reveal any specifics of a new chipset, but praised VIA for its work on Mini-ITX 2.0. ‘VIA has pioneered small form factor PCs, in contrast to competing closed designs,’ said Henry. He also added that Mini-ITX 2.0 ‘allows customers to play today’s latest PC games and experience new video and photo applications available with Nvidia’s DX10 GPUs.’

Mini-ITX 2.0 expands upon VIA’s original Mini-ITX specification, by having a 16x PCI-E slot as standard, as well as DirectX 9 integrated graphics and support for a minimum of 2GB of DDR2 memory. Mini-ITX 2.0 boards will retain the original specification’s dimensions of 170 x 170mm, but will also require a ‘high-performance, power efficient x86 processor, such as the VIA Nano processor.’

With a 16x PCI-E slot and a decent processor, the boards will be able to run games with a decent discrete graphics card, and TweakTown has shot a video of a Nano processor running Crysis, which you can see below.

Nvidia refused to comment on the rumour about making a chipset for VIA’s Nano CPUs, but many people see this as evidence that Nvidia and VIA (which has an x86 license) are co-operating in light of the increasing threat from Intel.