Next-Gen NVIDIA Chipset for Socket AM2 and AM2+ Revealed
The phrase 'next-generation' seems to be in the news daily as of late and today is no exception as NVIDIA announces its upcoming new chipset for AMD's socket AM2, and AM2+. The new chipset named MCP72 is planned to be the successor of the nForce 500 line as well as AMD's MCP68. The MCP72 will be jam packed full of new features such as HypterTransport 3.0 capabilities and PCIe 2.0 support.
This will be NVIDIA's first HyperTransport 3.0, or HT3, compatible chipset and a successor to the current nForce 500-series MCP and the upcoming AMD MCP68 chipsets. MCP72 will support AMD's socket AM2 and HT3 enabled AM2+. Socket AM2+ will house AMD's upcoming Athlon 64 Agena and Opteron Budapest quad-core processors. Unlike the nForce 590 SLI, the upcoming MCP72 is a single-chip solution similar to the previous nForce 3-series, mainstream nForce 4-series and nForce 500-series. It will also offer a small footprint and have low power consumption. MCP72 will also be NVIDIA's first PCIe 2.0 equipped chipset, making it ideal for next-generation PCIe peripherals and graphics cards. Other notable MCP72 features include support for six SATA 3.0Gbps and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports like the current nForce 500-series.
It is also possible that the MCP72 will come in SLI and Ultra variants like its predecessors and may even at some point come in a integrated-graphics version. MCP72 should be released in time for AMD's Agena and Budapest line of CPUs.
