Nvidia Buys Uli! [Archive]

Paradoxxx

12-14-2005, 11:46 PM

IT'S HARD to make a south bridge, said one Via executive when we asked him about Nvidia's Crush chipset in 2001. The chipset, now known as Nforce, has been quite successfully, especially Nforce 2 and Nforce 4. If you remember Nvidia had huge problems with the south bridge and so did ATI when it moved into the chipset arena more aggressively.

Nvidia's acquisition of ULI changes everything.

ATI had some problems with its SB generation of South bridges but it always had ULI as an alternative. If you didn’t like ATI's SB 400 or SB 450 you had a choice to go for ULI chip that had more features, was stable and was pin compatible with ATI's chips. It was a marriage of convenience. ATI did consider buying ULI but we don’t know why it didn't. We guess ATI has huge trust in its chipset unit.

Nvidia obviously needed a patent or two from ULI, a long time chipset manufacturer, and it certainly didn’t want ATI to get it first. So it reached intoo its pocket and acquired this company for not that much money. It sure got itself a bunch of nice engineers and more importantly, it prevented ATI from getting them.

This has to be a huge slap in ATI's face as this means that ATI will have to act on its own, unless it makes an agreement with remaining chipset manufacturers. I don’t think that ULI will produce ATI compatible chips for very much longer.

ATI now has to push hard to finish its SB600 south bridge that is supposed to bring all the necessary features and solve all the south bridge related problems once and for all. We don’t think that this will affect SIS and Via much, but if Nvidia decides to pull all ULI's chipsets out of the market it might create an opportunity for those two chipset manufacturers to try to make more business. We don’t think that Intel cares much about ULI as it hardly competed with Chipzilla at all.

But the move will cause some shuffling in the chipset market, that much is sure. µ

Pressure in ATi mc