Nvidia will roll out a Pentium 4-oriented nForce chipset by the end of Q1 2005, the company has confirmed.

An announcement will be made in that timeframe, an Nvidia spokesman revealed, Xbit Labs reports.

It's not hard to forecast a broad spec: 775-pin processor slot connected to 1066MHz FSB, with PCI Express - two x16 slots, if the SLI claim is correct - Serial ATA, dual-channel DDR 2 at 533MHz or 667MHz, USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet and Nvidia's security-oriented network processing technology.

By the time C19 ships, Intel should have got its 3.73GHz P4 Extreme Edition out of the door, incorporating not only the recently introduced 1066MHz FSB but its AMD64-like EM64T 64-bit addressing system. Intel should also have shipped the 2MB L2 cache, EM64T-enabled P4 600 series by the then.

Nvidia is said to be already sampling C19 to mobo makers, with volume shipments scheduled to commence around the time of the late Q1 2005 launch or early Q2. The chipsets are claimed to be coming out of IBM's fab, rather than TSMC.

The graphics chip specialist's move follows last month's announcement that it had signed a P4 bus licence will Intel. Arch-rival ATI already has such a licence and is expected to use it again next quarter to ship versions of its Radeon Xpress chipsets for the P4 600 series. ®

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