The chipset is rumoured to be in development at Nvidia, initially for the Athlon or Duron. As soon as Nvidia gets a licensing deal with Intel, it will begin work on a chipset for the PIII and Celeron.
The spec of the as yet unconfirmed chipset, which would be Nvidia's first, looks like this:
DDR Memory (two versions to be implemented - but we'll discuss that later)
Socket-A support, 266Mhz bus (a P!!! version is in the planning stages)
Integrated GeForce2 MX 3D core
4x AGP
New MCP-1 SouthBridge to be used
The Crush is basically NVIDIA's first foray into the chipset arena. It looks to be a really cutting-edge design - and I'm sure it'll appeal to a wide spectrum of the PC enthusiast market.
There are two versions of the 'board that will become available - one will have a 64-bit memory bus, and the other will use a 128-bit pathway. Both will be able to use either PC1600 (200Mhz) DDR memory or PC2100 (266Mhz) RAM - although the 128-bit version will require you to have your DIMMs arranged in pairs (a'la the old EDO way).
The motherboard will also have an on-board GeForce2MX controller, although details of it's implementation are unavailable - for example, whether it will utilize shared or dedicated memory, the amount of RAM it has (if it does have it's own dedicated set), whether or not it supports Twin-View and also the core clock speed. There are rumors that future versions of Crush will utilize an NV17 core, although this can't be confirmed at the present time.
Of course - the GeForce2 MX on-board can be disabled by simply using an AGP card in the provided slot. On the other hand, if you have a PCI video card you might even be able to use a twin monitor configuration!
Crush will be available sometime around April~May of 2001. NVIDIA will probably introduce this chipset either at the end of this month, or at the beginning of December.
