NVIDIA had been a little behind AMD for releasing high-performance chipsets supporting HyperTransport 3.0 interface for the Phenom series processors. The green giant managed to release the nForce 780a and 750a chipsets. It was recently, that AMD released a new overclocking algorithm call Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC), that basically puts clock-generators into the chipset for fine-tuning clock speeds. The companion SB750 southbridge by AMD handled this feature, on some of the newer 790 FX and 790 GX motherboards. As for NVIDIA, the 780a isn't really a SPP + MCP design. The so called northbridge here is the MCP itself (MCP78A), and the so called southbridge on 780a motherboards, is actually an nForce 200 chip that handles PCI-Express lanes and broadcasts data to multiple graphics cards, so the MCP had to be equipped with the feature.



News surfaced earlier, that NVIDIA would be giving the nForce 780a/750a a minor update to allow ACC support. It now looks like the company would be taking the opportunity to release new chipsets altogether, around the same time AMD comes up with DDR3-supportive AM3 socket processors. The new chip, MCP82, would have two variants: the MCP82-S1 and MCP82-S2. The S1 chipset would be a graphics subsystem power-house, being the higher-end model. It would offer a total of 35 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes for 3-way SLI. The S2 version comes with 19 PCI-Express lanes for 2-way SLI. The two chips come with the same exact pin layouts as the older MCP7xA series, and hence would help motherboard manufacturers adopt the new chipset better.


Source: Expreview