Just as NVIDIA's nForce chipset was beginning to pick up steam with yesterday's announcement of an OEM design win with Compaq, at CeBIT NVIDIA is already demonstrating a new version of the chipset - the nForce 620-D and 615-D.
There isn't too much new about these two additions to the nForce family; as you can probably guess, the 620-D is a successor to the 420-D and the 615-D is a successor to the quietly launched 415-D which lacks any integrated video.
The main difference between the 600 series and the 400 series is added support for DDR333 memory. Since both the 620-D and 615-D are dual channel solutions, DDR333 support increases their peak theoretical memory bandwidth to an impressive 5.33GB/s, a 25% improvement over the previous 420-D. What's interesting to note is that there is no mention of a cheaper single channel solution like the 220-D. If anything, the 615-D should be a single channel solution as we've already proved that having dual 64-bit memory channels does not improve performance without an integrated GPU to use the extra memory bandwidth.
The success of the new 600 series will be dependent entirely on the industry's adoption of DDR333. All signs are pointing to DDR333 carrying a noticeable price premium throughout the majority of this year. If prices were to come down however that could mean a lot for the performance of the nForce's integrated graphics. The additional memory bandwidth would bring the 3D performance of the IGP up above that of the desktop GeForce2 MX400.
The first nForce 620-D and 615-D motherboards will be available in late Q2 (May/June timeframe). ASUS, Leadtek and MSI will be among the first to ship boards based on the new chipset. As far as pricing goes, we see no reason for the 6xx chipsets to cost any more to produce than the 4xx series.
At CeBIT it's also clear that the strength of nForce is increasing with the total number of manufacturers demonstrating the platform at the show is up to 8 (up from 5 at Computex). Four of the original companies, ABIT, ASUS, MiTAC and MSI are displaying their boards but now AOpen, Chaintech, Leadtek and Soltek have joined the party.
Finally, NVIDIA is also demonstrating DDR400 on the nForce platform with Samsung. This is more of a technology demonstration since NVIDIA admits that DDR400 won't be a viable standard during the life of this nForce platform. NVIDIA did hint that they'd hopefully introduce something prior to DDR400 ever becoming ratified by JEDEC. If increasing memory bandwidth is the name of the game, then we're certain NVIDIA has at least a few tricks up their sleeves.