Transmeta, Nvidia confirm ‘nForce for Efficeon’ tale

Nvidia will offer a chipset for Transmeta's upcoming Efficeon processor, both companies said yesterday. The announcement confirms rumours that first appeared on the web back in July.

Like Nvidia's Opteron/Athlon 64-oriented nForce 3 Pro chipset, the Transmeta part is essentially a North Bridge/South Bridge combo. The Efficeon has its own memory controller and HyperTransport bus leaving the Nvidia chip to do little but handle I/O.

Curiously, it also provides an AGP port, according to one report. However, back in March, Transmeta said the Efficeon would include a AGP 4x controller on the die. Has it dropped AGP from the design? It seems unlikely, though it's possible Transmeta is playing down the chip's in-built AGP support now that graphics specialist Nvidia is on board with what will almost certainly be AGP 8x.

Transmeta wasn't available for comment as we posted this story. At the very least, we should find out in a month's time when the company details the Efficeon design at Microprocessor Forum. ®

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