Since the last post I about the lack of Nvidia chipsets for LGA 1156 platforms, I've dug a little deeper into the issue and found that some sites have reported that Nvidia is still planning to release a chipset.
Nvidia has, reportedly, been working on one new chipset for LGA 775 platforms, the MCP89, and also on the MCP99, targeting LGA1156 platforms from Intel. TechPowerUP has reported, some time ago, that the MCP99 chipset will feature an onboard local framebuffer - this is the likely and not cost-effective(512MB of DDR3 @ 64bit?) solution to Nvidia's problems. If Intel would release some LGA1156 35W CPUs for laptops, this would be a "not so bad" solution to have decent graphics capabilities on "Nehalem" based laptops without having to also pay for a P55 chipset besides the discrete GPU from Nvidia. Since Intel seems to be jumping right into "Clarkdale" cores with iGPU and will release just some 45W versions of "Lynnfield", that doesn't leave much market for an expensive solution like that.
The other option I can think of is also not good: it would involve embedding an NF200 based PCIe switch on the chipset and accessing either the RAM through the 16 PCIe lanes (at 8GB/s) or allowing an external graphics card to also use the bus. Failure to do both will not go very well with OEMs.
Had Nvidia not allowed SLI licenses for P55 chipsets, I would've thought they would release a chipset sans iGPU and make some bucks of SLI motherboards, probably even delivering a chipset that could even be more interesting than the P55 in some way other than just adding SLI support.
Source: TechPowerUP
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