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Nvidia to rush in Crush next week

UK, Taiwan launch on Monday

Nvidia's Xbox-derived, AMD Athlon 4-oriented Crush chipset will be unveiled on Monday 4 June at Taiwan's Computex show next week.

Not coincidentally, Nvidia is hosting a product launch here in London on 4 June. The show's taking place on British warship HMS Belfast, presumably to symbolise what Crush is going to do the opposition...

Not coincidentally -again - AMD will be launching its latest iteration of the Athlon 4 - the workstation and server part, we reckon - on the same day, with a European roll-out in Munich the following day.

Crush is based on the North- and Southbridge parts Nvidia designed for Xbox. The Northbridge integrates a memory controller - supporting single- and dual-channel DDR SDRAM, apparently - with GeForce 2 MX graphics. The Southbridge part - aka the Media Communications Processor - integrates audio and I/O.

Both parts were designed for Microsoft's Xbox. Nvidia let slip last year that it was working on modified versions of the two chips for the PC market.

There will be two Northbridge parts, making for two Crush variants, the 11 and the 12. The first has a 64-bit bus and supports single-channel DDR; the second has a 128-bit graphics bus and can handle two, parallel DDR memory buses. It's worth remembering - as Ace's Hardware points out - that the Athlon's frontside bus is 64 bits wide, so the Crush 12's Northbridge bus isn't going to make CPU operations any faster.

Ace's also has a list of desktop mobos, from ABIT, Gigabyte and MSI, that are based on Crush. Machines based on the part are expected to ship mid to late August. An item over at EBN suggests that the chipset will primarily target the notebook market. ®

Related Links

Ace's Hardware: Nvidia Crush news
EBN: Nvidia chip expected to grab spotlight at Taiwan show

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