WITH NFORCE 3 Professional now in volume production AMD has got to be wondering whether the chipset"s launch will help Opteron gain more market share. With the new 1xx CPU"s announced yesterday AMD is targeting the professional single-CPU workstation market where AGP functionality and expandability are more important. This is a critical juncture both for AMD and NVIDIA. With AMD so deeply in the red it needs Opteron to sell well into this space, and the NF3 Professional will be seen as an indicator for what kind of performance we can expect from the other Opteron and Athlon 64 chipsets set to debut later this year.
Delays kept nForce2 off the shelves for months after it was released; in order to avoid problems like this Nvidia is going to have to get Nforce3 right the first time and get it out the door. Fortunately the company has had two previous chipsets to learn from and NF3"s overall feature set isn"t quite as fancy as NF2"s was and doesn"t include integrated video or onboard SoundStorm technology.
If all does go as planned, Nzilla will be the first company to enter the workstation chipset market only two years after entering the desktop chipset market. For a company with no experience designing chipsets at all to first conquer the desktop space and now aim for the workstation area is unprecedented, and it speaks of Nvidia"s determination to excel in this new branch of the industry they"ve chosen to enter. Since the company"s nForce2 chipsets have an excellent reputation as stable, high-performing products (as to the video chipset designs), the chances are good that even notoriously conservative businesses will take a chance on Nvidia Having a reputation as a company that stands for well-engineered, high-quality products counts for a lot, especially when attempting to win designs from OEMs who"re always eyeing the bottom dollar.