Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
along with virtually everybody else in the chipset market, was fighting to stay alive. This is because a
new chipset manufacturer had come on the scene, and within a year or so of getting serious, it was
totally dominating the chipset market. That company was Intel, and after 1994, it had a virtual lock on
the chipset market. If you have a motherboard built since 1994 that uses or accepts an Intel processor,
chances are good that it has an Intel chipset on it as well.
Although ATI (prior to its merger with AMD), NVIDIA, VIA Technologies, and Silicon Integrated
Systems (SiS) provided a wide variety of alternatives to Intel chipsets during the first decade of the
twenty-first century, Intel is once again the sole maker of chipsets for its current processors.
What happened to Intel's former rivals? AMD has focused its former ATI chipset business squarely
on making chipsets for its own processors, whereas VIA Technologies is primarily an embedded
CPU/motherboard builder and SiS now focuses on HDTV and streaming media. The last rival to
Intel, NVIDIA, was unable to reach agreement with Intel over support for the new Core i-series
processors and stopped developing chipsets for Intel in late 2009.
If you use current models of AMD processors, you can choose from motherboards that use either
AMD or NVIDIA chipsets.
It is interesting to note that the original PC chipset maker, Chips and Technologies, survived by
changing course to design and manufacture video chips and found a niche in that market specifically
for laptop and notebook video chipsets. Chips and Technologies was subsequently purchased by Intel
in 1998 as part of Intel's video strategy.
Intel Chipsets
You can't talk about chipsets today without discussing Intel because it currently owns the majority of
the chipset market. It is interesting to note that we probably have Compaq to thank for forcing Intel
into the chipset business in the first place!
The thing that started it all was the introduction of the Enhanced Industry Standard Architecture
(EISA) bus designed by Compaq in 1989. At that time, Compaq had shared the bus with other
manufacturers in an attempt to make it a market standard. However, Compaq refused to share its EISA
bus chipset—a set of custom chips necessary to implement this bus on a motherboard.
Enter Intel, who decided to fill the chipset void for the rest of the PC manufacturers wanting to build
EISA bus motherboards. As is well known today, the EISA bus failed to become a market success,
except for a short-term niche server business, but Intel now had a taste of the chipset business—and
this it apparently wouldn't forget. With the introduction of the 286 and 386 processors, Intel became
impatient with how long it took the other chipset companies to create chipsets around its new
processor designs; this delayed the introduction of motherboards that supported the new processors.
For example, it took more than two years after the 286 processor was introduced for the first 286
motherboards to appear and just over a year for the first 386 motherboards to appear after the 386
had been introduced. Intel couldn't sell its processors in volume until other manufacturers made
motherboards that would support them, so it thought that by developing motherboard chipsets for a
new processor in parallel with the new processor, it could jumpstart the motherboard business by
providing ready-made chipsets for the motherboard manufacturers to use.
Intel tested this by introducing the 420 series chipsets along with its 486 processor in April 1989.
This enabled the motherboard companies to get busy right away, and in only a few months the first
486 motherboards appeared. Of course, the other chipset manufacturers weren't happy; now they had
Intel as a competitor, and Intel would always have chipsets for new processors on the market first!
