Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
component count meant the boards had more room for integrating other items formerly
found on expansion cards. Later, the four chips augmenting the 82C206 were replaced by
a new set of only three chips, and the entire set was called the New Enhanced AT (NEAT)
CS8221 chipset. This was later followed by the 82C836 Single Chip AT (SCAT) chipset,
which finally condensed all the chips in the set to a single chip.
Other chip manufacturers rapidly copied the chipset idea. Companies such as Acer, Erso,
Opti, Suntac, Symphony, UMC, and VLSI each gained an important share of this market.
Unfortunately for many of them, the chipset market has been a volatile one, and many
of them have long since gone out of business. In 1993, VLSI had become the dominant
force in the chipset market and had the majority of the market share; by the next year,
VLSI (which later was merged into Philips Semiconductors), along with virtually every-
body 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.
WhathappenedtoIntel'sformerrivals?AMDhasfocuseditsformerATIchipsetbusiness
squarely onmaking chipsets forits own processors, whereas VIA Technologies is primar-
ilyanembeddedCPU/motherboardbuilderandSiSnowfocusesonHDTVandstreaming
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, sur-
vivedbychangingcoursetodesignandmanufacturevideochipsandfoundanicheinthat
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!
