Chipset to cost 30-60% more than high end Intel chipsets. It looks like NVIDIA will be cashing in big time with?their recently announced nForce 4 for Intel chipset.?DigiTimes is reporting that NVIDIA will be asking for 80$ a unit compared to about 50$ for a high end Intel chipset like the 925XE or the 955X.?Costs may drop to 65$ for Tier One manufacturers but that is still a significant premium.?
The nForce4 SLI Intel Edition will be aimed at the high-end of the market, which accounts for about 10% of the Intel market, according to Drew Henry, general manager of Nvidia's media and communications processor (MCP) business ...
The new nForce4 for the Intel platform will be applied into mainstream motherboards within one year
The pricing of the chipsets shows the amount of market clout that SLI commands right now seeing as how manufacturers are concerned about price cuts of a dollar or two. Mainstream nForce Intel motherboards will come when DDR2 is mainstream since they are not designing a DDR SPP unit. One thing that NVIDIA talked about during the nForce briefing was that the market is near the tipping point between DDR and DDR2 and price parity is not much further away. When the market is comfortable with DDR2 and it is available in volume, that is when we will see the nForce 4 Ultra for Intel or whatever the name will be by then.
