On-Chip Integration

Thank the sub-$1,000 PC market for on-chip integration of features that were once the exclusive domain of PCI and PCMCIA cards. "You can't really afford to do much with cards" in that price range, says Rob Enderle, research fellow at Giga Group. Not only is ease and speed of assembly key, but "any warranty calls at all will eat into your profit,whatever's left," he says. "You want solid-state as much as you can get."

On the desktop, chip-makers this year are calling for the rapid adoption of serial ATA directly in the Northbridge IC, with at least one manufacturer projecting the inclusion of both Gigabit Ethernet and fully integrated 802.11 wireless networking by year's end. nVidia has already loaded the highest-end version of its nForce2 platform with virtually every imaginable feature, from worthy 3D graphics to dual 10/100 NICs to three-port FireWire, multigigabit-per-second busses that will soon be the norm as high-speed chip-to-chip interfaces and next-generation peripheral links in the form of PCI Express and PCI-X 2.0 take hold.

Just what that tremendous power on the desktop will do still remains to be seen. AMR Research expects specialized 64-bit designs to drive next-generation development of machines with enough power and data bandwidth to enable what senior analyst Bob Parker calls the "decision-maker workstation," akin to the engineering workstation market made popular by Sun and other Unix vendors during the past two decades.

"It's going to maybe, optimistically, be 10 percent of the desktop portfolio at companies" that are preloaded with such heavy capabilities on the motherboard, Parker says.

Mobile Mania

In the mobile chipset market, ongoing competition to bundle larger feature sets in smaller packages, along with the drive toward tablet computing, is pushing manufacturers to explore new options. ALi's CyberALADDiN-T, for example, is gaining attention as a tablet platform, with its 400-MHz system bus and HDTV-grade video-output capabilities.

Vendors are jumping to push at least one new technology into their chipset offerings; all support at least some level of DDR memory. Intel has already put a USB 2.0 solution in its 852GM chipset, and SiS incorporates an MPEG2 (DVD) decoder in notebook-ready chipset lines for both AMD and Intel.

In addition, laptop graphics components continue to shed their deserved reputation for laughable quality. With DDR memory-sharing, integrated graphics are at least serviceable, and VIA now touts an internal AGP 8X-equivalent graphics engine in its ProSavage chipset line.

Discrete mobile GPUs are even more promising, as the nVidia GeForce4 Go and ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 offer desktop-level performance, allowing external RAM or up to 64 MB of on-chip integrated video memory. Both vendors integrate LCD-optimized shading and smoothing techniques.

On the heels of the Intel Centrino platform,the first major announcement in mobile chipsets this year that is being launched as a quality-of-experience play,Transmeta and VIA are both gearing up for another run at the notebook market with security-enhanced CPUs.

"I'm pretty sure both companies will offer 'platforms' of their own," says Peter Glaskowsky, principal analyst with MicroDesign Resources.

Intel, obviously, defends its platform-branding approach as meaningful beyond just adding a new logo and jingle. "In the past, [OEMs] would tend to do more shopping around for individual components than do the validation themselves," says Bob Gregory, director of initiatives planning at Intel. "They rely on us more for that now."

Brand Value

Regardless, IT buyers looking under the hood seem to prefer sticking with the Intel brand from top to bottom. In part, that has been by design, as Intel has tried to carefully protect its chipset and CPU combinations through patents and legal action. "I think they're getting dangerously close to antitrust behavior, which could be a different kind of drama," Enderle says. "I don't think folks care a lot, but they probably should."

Even so, companies such as VIA and SiS have moved ahead with contested chipset implementations, but Intel still wins the minds of business despite lagging behind in features such as AGP 8X and IEEE 1394 integration.

"The Intel chipset is still the majority choice in the motherboard business," says William Hsiung, president of Medialand Systems, a VAR in Hayward, Calif. Many companies just don't look at the chipset brand and series when evaluating RFPs. Cathy Clarke, a spokeswoman for Greenwich Technology Partners, New York, told VARBusiness that the issues of chipset branding or feature sets are simply not of paramount importance to consultants or customers when designing a corporate system rollout. OEM and CPU brands tend to carry the day.

"Most customers trust the company that they're dealing with, so they will listen to our suggestions when we compare VIA and Intel," Hsiung says. "And after we explain, we have a very good chance to sell VIA instead of Intel." The secondary brands have fought a perception problem driven by the frequent need for driver CDs outside the core Windows install to obtain full functionality, as well as the suspicion that product-line turnover was driven by flaws rather than feature improvements.

VIA says it got the message. "To sell to corporate customers, you have to provide a stable platform, extend the life of existing products and make sure you're still manufacturing them while the demand is there," says Richard Brown, associate vice president of marketing.

AMD plays the exact opposite of Intel's game, having essentially exited the Athlon chipset market in favor of partner companies. The new nVidia nForce2 chipset is widely seen as AMD's best chance to penetrate mainstream IT, given the arm's-length feature set and the broad shoulders of a brand with more American cachet than the likes of VIA, which actually dominates the Athlon chipset market.

But holdups with the nForce2 launch "scared the hell out of" one major PC manufacturer, according to Enderle, and he foresees a chipset re-entry by AMD "if nVidia can't fix its problem." The major advantage to nForce2 for the enterprise is system image stability, both forward and backward. "Nobody is giving what nVidia is promising to give them, although Intel promises with the 845 chipset image stability backward," he says.

If the current slate of integrated chipset features does not appeal to buyers, conventional wisdom says that all one needs to do is wait a few extra months for the engineers to work in more features and work out more cost. "More chips mean more transistors, and there's always something to do with more transistors," Glaskowsky says.

Jason Compton ([email protected]) is a freelance technology writer based in Evanston, Ill.