I had cautioned last month that we might not ever see an Nvidia chipset for LGA 1156 CPUs. We now have a confirmation of this from Nvidia but the chipset woes don't stop there.
The story about the ditching is from Fudzilla and goes on like this: "Nvidia confirms to us that it won't make a DMI chipset due to legal pressure from Intel".
Given that Fuad has been very pro-Nvidia lately and this is bad news, this time I'll take is word for it, or part of it. Nvidia calling the quits is not just as big of a legal problem as it is an engineering one, one with bandwidth starved bus, one which Intel was carefull enough to craft even though it end up delaying their integrated offerings, known as "Clarkdale".
Nvidia could build a discrete chipset, or I/O Hub, for the LGA 1156 processors but this theory was mostly buried when they announced that would be licensing SLI support for P55 chipsets.
There's a bigger issue on the horizon, which is called Ion 2. It's supposed to be coupled with Atoms yet again but I wonder with what. Here's the diagram of Intel's Atom N2xx successor, "Pineview":
Will the Ion 2 be a thing for the current Atom? One that it will stop manufacturing as soon as "Pineview" is out? The new Atom is expected already this year. The story is the same as before: no FSB, no bandwidth to access the embedded memory controller, no bandwidth for graphics. Hence, no DMI chipsets. Everybody seems quiet about this right now, so I'm going to revisit rumor: Nvidia needs to seriously take a look at VIA. Like now.
It either needs to buy VIA to acquire it's IP and x86 license or it needs to make an investment on it to have Nano processors coupled to Nvidia's chipsets. The notebook market is as big as it's ever been and a combination of both would deliver very interesting performance, albeit at a higher TDP than Atom's. That hasn't been a problem for VIA right now, imagine with an actual Nvidia graphics core (and compute core) behind it. Plus, the dual core Nano is expected next year.
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