From theinquirer (kick ass if this all happens)
NFORCE 4 will be the name of the project that will finally bring PCI Express to the Athlon K8 market. This chipset will be socket 754/939 ready and 940 compatible and all CPUs Athlon 64s, FX, Sempr0ns and Opterons will work on it.
The platform will have one to two PCI express 16 slots making this Geforce 6800 SLI mode possible for not quite as much crazy money as you'll have to invest in Tumwater and Xeon CPU.
The good news for Sound Storm lovers is that this chipset finally features these nice audio capabilities. It's now called Sound Storm 2 - no surprise there - but we dont know anything about its features as yet.
Nvidia PCI Express stuff was scheduled for Q4 and it hasn't changed from that so far. We wrote Nvidias C8K-04 captured in living hues and now we know that this is the Nforce 4 project. µ
Last time we asked Nvidia's Drew Henry director of this chipset business about Nforce 5 for Intel CPU's he said laughing where is Nforce 4. This is your answer Drew. µ
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OUR CROATIAN FRIEND Theo Valich decided to share some information with us regarding Nforce 4 chipset, the one we mentioned last week.
The chipset will be Socket 754/939 and 940 capable and will have multiprocessing capabilities. You will be able to use it as a single CPU platform. And you will also be able to use it as a two way, four way and up to a maximum of eight way as a multiprocessing platform.
This chipset will support a maximum of 32 PCI-E lanes says Theo, has suggested 1x16 X PCI-E slot, one 1 x 8X for SLI card and four times one lane for peripheral devices. This definitely confirms our previous claim that Nforce 4 will be a platform which will let you plug two Geforce 6 series PCI-E cards into a machine and end up with a much cheaper MP machine than those based on Intel's "Tumwater" chipset.
The chipset will support five PCI slots, two times Nvidia Gbit Ethernet and Nvidia RAID, similar in function to Intel's "Matrix Array", says Theo.
The Nforce 4, CK8-04 will support eight S-ATA drives and six P-ATA drives and for additional connectivity you will have no less then 10 USB 2.0 ports.
As for sound freaks, this chipset will feature SP-10, Soundstorm 2 audio that will be Dolby Digital 5.1 compliant and it will be able to do EX effects at 20 GFlops processing power. Soundstorm 2 supports 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 speaker configurations.
It sounds good doesn't it? But it will arrive towards the very end of this year. µ