nVidia vs. Intel - Chipsets
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Intel was the big king of chipsets for Intel CPUs. There was a tiny window of VIA chipsets, but over 90 percent of chipsets were Intel's own design. nVidia at this time was designing some really good chipsets, but they stayed with AMD processors. AMD was happy; they needed chipsets and nVidia was happy to help.
Then along came SLI, and nVidia decided to go all out on the Intel platform. Intel didn't really appreciate this very much. They wanted to have nVidia allow SLI on their chipsets and continue to let nVidia work with AMD only. nVidia and Intel are still nowhere close to this kind of agreement and it probably won't happen any time soon. Intel is feeling a little jealous that they aren't the only ones in the chipset game anymore.
The chipset battles weren't over after this. Intel has control over their CPU design and what it will and won't run on. I guess Intel was feeling some heat from the 680i chipset and decided to change some things up with the newest quad core CPUs.
The end result was that the 680i chipset couldn't boot with any of the new quad core CPUs. This led to a huge backlash against nVidia and their distributors. Whose fault is it? Well, the ES versions of the CPUs worked fine, but when those retail CPUs hit the shelves, it was a no go. nVidia had to rush their next generation chipset to get support for these new CPUs.
Next: GPUs >>
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