DOCUMENTS SEEN BY the INQUIRER at CeBIT in the press bar have revealed Nvidia is ready and waiting to support the Athlon64 (Clawhammer) platform with a triple set of offerings. The firm will introduce single chip products that will support desktop and mobile machines. The discrete chips will be called the Crush K8 and the Crush K8S. The former has been ready for a fair old while – although obviously AMD is not yet ready, while the latter will be released in the third quarter of this year.
The K8, includes USB 2.0, ATA 133, Nvidia Ethernet (Enet), PCI 2.3, AC97, hypertransport and DTR PowerNow. But the K8S will add eight ports of USB 2.0, support Serial ATA, Nvidia Raid, Nvidia Gigabit Ethernet, hypertransport and PowerNow. On the graphics front, Nvidia will also offer in the third quarter the K8G, which will include Nview, GeForce 4 MX, AGP 8X, Serial ATA, Nvidia RAID, PCI 2.3, AC97, hypertransport and eight USB ports.
All of these products will be offered for notebooks as well as desktops and all of them will also use a single set of drivers. The Crush K8S will be positioned as a top end board for the enthusiast and gamer market, and will include a 16 x 16 1.6GHz hyperthreaded front side bus. Nvidia showed some of this future technology to its partners at CeBIT, behind the scenes.Now all Nvidia, Via and SIS can do is hope that AMD will get round to releasing an Athlon64 when it promised.