With the release of ICH2, Intel brought CNR, a new low-cost riser card standard to the market. As is the case these days, AMD, VIA and others have started a competing standard named ACR, or Advanced Communications Riser. ACR is compatible with AMR cards but adds the possibility of cards that carry Ethernet, DSL, and extra USB ports. ACR is an open standard that, to our knowledge, has no licensing fees. Also, we have been told by an ACR supporter that a major reason for ACR is that CNR is Intel architecture specific. With Intel backing CNR with several partners and a broad number of others supporting ACR, we expect both standards to be of moderate success but neither will grow as large as PCI.

As die size shrinks, chipmakers find themselves with room to add more gates. For chipsets, more gates means more features on-die. Chipset makers have and will integrate more and more I/O controllers with each generation of chipset. More integrated controllers mean less components, which usually leads to an overall reduction in system cost. This is the main technological factor behind where future chipsets are going...

The big news for VIA chipsets is S3 video integration. The VIA/S3 relationship started with a partnership and essentially turned into an acquisition. VIA has already shipped a P6 chipset using integrated S3 Savage4 video and is just about to ship their KM133, which is essentially the KT133 with integrated video. In the future, sometime after VIA takes their chipset process to .18 or .15 micron, we may see Savage 2000 video integrated into VIA chipsets. Savage4 is significantly faster than Intel's integrated video. It is unclear at this point how SiS' or ATI's integrated video solutions compare.