why did amd give up on chip sets?

[quest55720]

I was always curious why did AMD give up on chips sets for MB? By my logic they should of spent a good amount of cash to build chips sets that rival the performance and stability of the INTEL ones. I always wanted to try AMD but not untill the NForce2 was able to find a good reliable chip set. If AMD would of built up its chips sets instead of letting others SiS and VIA do the dirty work I think people would not be so reluctant to try AMD. I am waiting for the second revisions of the NF4 MBs to up grade. Been burned to many times on first revision boards lol. If NVIDIA leaves the MB for any reason I just could not see buying another AMD product.

 

[Fox5]

ATI just started making amd boards.

Anyhow, VIA boards got very good by the end of the athlon xp era. And as for the athlon 64, the integrated memory controller seems to make it easier to make athlon 64 motherboards, certainly even the crappiest athlon 64 motherboards are much better than much of what was around during the athlon xp days.(and didn't amd have some of the crappiest chipsets back then? I guess they could make one easily now, but could they pack it with features like nvidia and via do with SATA and RAID and integrated firewall and such?)

 

[3dilettante]

With the integrated northbridge, the problems AMD had with third party northbridge chips is mostly taken care of. The south bridge is usually not as critical to performance and is more of features thing.

AMD apparently doesn't have the resources to handle a chipset business, and now that its two fabs are dedicated to flash and processors, there's little room to fit in something that would probably have poor margins.

There's little chance that people would be willing to pay extra for an AMD chipset motherboard as it doesn't have the same reputation as Intel, so chipset margins would very thin while also using up very tight capacity that could be put into higher margin processors and memory.

 

[Saem]

The southbridge is actually very important in terms of stability and non-memory I/O, the northbirdge more so in terms of performance (memory).

Crappy southbridge implementations and their friends (*cough*highpoint*cough*) have led to data loss and lots of other instability/incompatability fun.

 

[3dilettante]

The southbridge is actually very important in terms of stability and non-memory I/O, the northbirdge more so in terms of performance (memory).

Crappy southbridge implementations and their friends (*cough*highpoint*cough*) have led to data loss and lots of other instability/incompatability fun.

True, I think I was trying to repress my VIA KX133 + SB Live! experience. At least now there are plenty of vendors making stable southbridges, and they are better able to devote significant resources to researching, designing, and putting out much more feature-rich designs than AMD has time to worry about.

 

[karlotta]

they never realy made chipsets for mass production anyway. They always made chipsets to set a standard and fill the gap untill Via and the rest could fill production. Nothing has changed.

 

[swaaye]

VIA's chipsets have really gotten good IMO. However, the only major problem I have ever really had was the SBlive vs. the 686B southbridge. And that's not entirely VIA's fault. Apparently the SBLive's PCI implementation isn't exactly ideal and there is a conflict between the VIA chipset and the card.

I've been playing with a MVP3 board for a while (I like building retro comps) and it's really not all that bad. The thing is running my Radeon 7200 SE (200/200) AGP just fine. Though I wouldn't ask it to run a Geforce 256 or GTS cuz they draw a lot more power and that is a definite weakness of these super 7 boards.

Interesting thing though is that MVP3 doesn't support AGP Texture Acceleration even though it says it's in 2X mode with sideband enabled. I'm betting it has a flawed implementation and the chipset drivers are disabling it.

With the weird problems I've had with my Nforce 2 Ultra 400, such as APIC vs SBlive and IDE driver issues, I'd definitely recommend a VIA KT880 or KT600 instead.

I don't think AMD needs to make chipsets.

 

[arjan de lumens]

Interesting thing though is that MVP3 doesn't support AGP Texture Acceleration even though it says it's in 2X mode with sideband enabled. I'm betting it has a flawed implementation and the chipset drivers are disabling it.

MVP3's AGP support has to be one of the buggiest features I have ever seen in a chipset. I remember having a couple of MVP3 motherboards; the first one wouldn't work with AGP at all unless you forced the card to run in PCI mode (AGP is basically a superset of 66MHz PCI), the second one crashed a lot if you equipped EDO RAM and an AGP card on the same board (the board had both EDO and SDRAM slots, and the documentation for the board did NOT list EDO+AGP as a combination to avoid), both were unstable as hell when I tried to use a PCI TV card (which writes directly to onboard memory on the AGP card and has had absolutely NO problems on the 5 or so non-MVP3 mobos I've tried it in).

More recent VIA chipsets appear to be quite a bit better, though.