Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

[bigbeark]

A sister thread to the boardmaker one. Chipset makers no longer supplying motherboard
chipsets?

ALI

NVIDIA

SIS

VIA

I thought ASUS A7NX8 (NVIDIA) was the best-ever socket A board. What happened to them?

The others made some good chipsets too. Where did they go?

Your comments please.

[mariushm]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

ALI just didn't have the marketshare outside Asia where I think they were present in lots of very cheap computers. They used to sell their chipsets as AMD chipsets (AMD contracted them or something like that)

Via still make their own chipsets, for their own processors. They stopped making chipsets for Intel because Intel stopped licensing them and AMD started to get into the chipset business themselves. I think the last socket they had license for was socket 370 i think.

SIS was bought by someone.. it's a mess and I don't remember it now, it was probably S3 and then some parts were sold to VIA or something like that.

NVIDIA ... same story, Intel didn't want them to make chipsets anymore and refused to give them licenses. The profits from AMD chipsets were probably too small or they decided not to make them when AMD decided to buy ATI ...

Nowadays a lot of the functionality that was in northbridge is inside the processor, and there's even processors that don't need chipsets at all (everything's built in).. there's little profits in chipsets.

Now that I think about it, the battery is also huge... but at least some manufacturers install it vertically.


Honestly, what I'm still surprised with is the I/O chip common on most boards and all the passives they need around... it handles ps2 keyboard and mouse, fan sensors, some uart, some other crap, yet it takes a hunge amount of space on a motherboard... just look at top left here: http://www.ixbt.com/mainboard/gigaby...-ud7/board.jpg or below the vga connector on this itx board http://www.ixbt.com/mainboard/asus/i...big/mobo-2.jpg

I guess they're too cheap and too generic for some manufacturers to invest in making them BGA or innovate and reduce the footprint.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

most northbridges (now called ICH's at least for intel) handle the pci-express lanes for the audio, nic. and Handle USB and SATA. The Higher end PCI-express lanes (x16) are usually on CPU. They have passives cause they want audio options for the motherboard, instead of integrating audio or nics into the ICH itself.

Onboard video is going out the wayside. Integrating video onto a chip with a passive heatsink tended to be problematic, not to mention required more power and generated more heat. Processors with APU's have a big heatsink that is simply the processor heatsink.

Nvidia does technically make a chip for SLI motherboards, as its not integrated into the CPU like crossfire is.

PS/2 is also slowly going into the wayside, why there are still some motherboards that still use it, I have no idea (with the exception of server boards)

[mariushm]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

Lots of gamers still prefer ps2 because it does not suffer from latency associated with usb, which polls at 125 Hz by default (so keys are sent to pc every 8ms) unless the driver (or user manually) sets the polling rate to 1000 hz.
PS2 also has a higher interrupt priority if I remember correctly.

If it were up to me, everything in the back of a board these days should be usb, 2 network connectors (10gbps is starting to be cheap) and audio...
Audio annoys me as well, there's a huge amount of space taken out by these old 3.5 audio jacks.

[Compgeke]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

PS/2 on gaming boards is because USB has a 6KRO limitation without firmware trickery on keyboard side (such as making one board show up as 2 or 3). PS/2 on the other hand can register every key at once providing your board controller is capacitive or you have diodes on every key.

[Topcat]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

The PC market as a whole is about gone as well.... Not much demand anymore. Phones & tablets are taking over the consumer market....

[rhomanski]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

Unless they make a 30 inch widescreen phone I'll stick with my PC. I've got the double cataract blues the Doc said last week when I told him Obama turned down the sun to fight global warming.

[c_hegge]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

I think the last socket they had license for was socket 370 i think.

VIA made chipsets for intel CPUs all the way up to the early C2D era (s775). The MSI P4M900M2 is an example

[pfrcom]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

VIA made chipsets for intel CPUs all the way up to the early C2D era (s775). The MSI P4M900M2 is an example

And the Gigabyte GA-VM900M - handy to have C2D and four IDE support

[rugger]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

Most of the 3rd party chipsets have been pretty crap and bug infested.

Particularly VIA.

Intel chipsets have been mostly rock solid since the P35 was released (although the LX and BX chips were also legendary for their rock stability)

[mariushm]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

Yeah, you guys are right. I was thinking of cpu sockets.

It was a long time ago so I don't remember it quite well. VIA had some licensing agreements with intel giving them documentation for chipsets but at some point VIA bought some processor manufacturer that included cross licensing agreement to patents for x86 processors ... yeah, it was Centaur from IDT : http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1188382

Those patents then gave VIA the ability/rights to make x86 processors but if I remember correctly cpu socket wise, they only had rights to use socket 370 for desktop computers.

That's why VIA then moved on to their own sockets (nanobga2 etc)

[Uranium-235]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

via still makes a whole bunch of other chip for other things. VLI (USB 3.0), Vectro (USB 2.0), Vinyl (Audio), Solomon (Wireless), Rhine (Ethernet), Fire (Firewire), Card Reader chips, SATA/IDE controllers (no codename), Embedded CPU's (for low power, small solutions)

they learned early to keep making stuff. thought most of it is used in cards, and not motherboard embedded solutions

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

Most of the 3rd party chipsets have been pretty crap and bug infested.

Particularly VIA.

Intel chipsets have been mostly rock solid since the P35 was released (although the LX and BX chips were also legendary for their rock stability)

The only problem with post-KT133 chipsets, was that overclockers pissed and moaned, because of the PCI frequency being linked to the FSB frequency.

(KT133 was the buggiest)

Via's drivers were good.

[lti]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

VIA had the worst drivers I've ever seen, and I never saw a working VIA USB controller. However, I have only used one VIA chipset (KN133 - mobile KT133) and one USB 2.0 card with a VIA controller.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

Looked all good with KT400. The only problem I saw with KT400 was being impossible to unlink the FSB frequency from the PCI frequency and the FSB frequency from the AGP frequency.
That means the PCI and AGP frequencies go higher when looking for max OC.
Looks like I had a wall at only around 180 Mhz for the FSB.
(3D Mark 2001 SE kept getting terminated, it's probably the AGP frequency)

[momaka]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

PS/2 is also slowly going into the wayside, why there are still some motherboards that still use it, I have no idea (with the exception of server boards)

So I can plug in my IBM model M keyboard and kick your ass in any game .
And most USB keyboards these days are either flimsy junk or overpriced (and sometimes both).

Audio annoys me as well, there's a huge amount of space taken out by these old 3.5 audio jacks.

Those aren't going anywhere anytime soon. The 3.5 mm jacks are just too damn reliable and simple. Optical S/PDIF can be fragile. I do like coaxial S/PDIF, though. This is also why VGA D-SUB isn't dead yet. I remember reading an interesting article that compared the number of connect/disconnect cycles that various computer ports could take. The highest and most robust by far was the D-SUB type (i.e. VGA, parallel, serial, etc.)... but also the most expensive. USB was second in terms of reliability, but provided best "bang-for-buck" in terms of reliability vs. cost. DVI didn't fare too well. And HDMI and SATA/e-SATA were just plain terrible.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

So I can plug in my IBM model M keyboard and kick your ass in any game .
And most USB keyboards these days are either flimsy junk or overpriced (and sometimes both).

yeah you buy cheap you get cheap.

PS/2 has a limit to the number of keys you can hold down at once, and USB still has a limit but its higher from the experiments i've ran

[momaka]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

yeah you buy cheap you get cheap.

I don't buy keyboards, period. It's not that I don't want to spend the money on one. Just that old, quality keyboards are easy to find.

PS/2 has a limit to the number of keys you can hold down at once, and USB still has a limit but its higher from the experiments i've ran

Which is contradictory to posts #4 and 5 above. Interesting.

[c_hegge]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

Nope. Post 5 is correct according to pretty much every technical document/page you read. The limit is between 3 and 6 for USB keyboards (4 on my GK-K6800), while PS/2 lacks a limit, and is theoretically capable of registering every key at once. However, the controller in the keyboard can sometimes limit you to fewer keys.

[mariushm]

Re: Mainboard chipset makers - Gone

With the standard USB class (human interface device), there is a limitation of 6 keys ... see the explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hu...e_device_class

If the manufacturer implements their own driver, the controller inside the keyboard could theoretically pack as many keys into a data frame (or consecutive data frames) which would then be decoded by the driver on the computer and translated to whatever is needed. Naturally, there may be some input lag depending on the usb polling rate and the driver's priority and other things.