Yes, it"s Dell-goes-AMD rumour time again, this time courtesy of a story over at Tom"s Hardware.
Said story notes that Nvidia has completed its nForce integrated chipset. That sounds reasonable to us, as does the suggestion that mobo makers Asus, Gigabyte and Abit will start selling boards based on the part next month.
But what"s this at the end of the story? Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens will be shipping PCs based on nForce, it says.
Now since nForce is designed to work with AMD"s Athlon processor, that surely means Dell is about to release an Athlon-based computer.
We"re sceptical. Rumours last June that Dell was about to offer an Athlon 4-based notebook came to nought. We know for a fact that Dell tests all new AMD parts and will have to use appropriate chipsets to do so, so it"s entirely possible that there"s an nForce-based box running a top-speed Athlon in the company"s labs even as we speak. That"s not the same thing as shipping one, however.
Another option is that Nvidia has licensed the Pentium 4 bus and is about to unveil a version of nForce that supports the P4 chip. It has certainly been talking to Intel about a P4 licence - it admitted as much at the nForce launch - but products based on it aren"t expected until next year, since it"s having enough of a job getting the Athlon-oriented part out of the door