British website The Inquirer revealed information about the next generation Intel Nforce chipset.

The Intel Nvidia chipset will support both 800 and 1066FSB for P4 Intel CPUs. It will support socket 775 CPUs based on Prescott, a new 2MB 600 core and future dual core Smithfield CPUs. The chipset already has support for Intel's 64 bit marchitecture.

The Inquirer suggests that it will come in two versions, as the chipset can support one and two memory channels. It supports DDR2 667 and DDR2 533 memory. It cannot support plain DDR one memory.

As with the Nforce 4 chipset, the Nforce 5 will have 20 PCIe configurable lanes and if you use two graphic cards you will end up with eight lanes per card with four left for other connectors.

Some of the designs being developed will have three to maximal four PCIe 1X lanes.

MCP04 will have support for two IDE ports, 10 USB 2.0, 1Gbit LAN, four S-ATA II ports capable of Raid 5 and 7.1 Audio. We are not sure what kind of audio it will support yet, but I guess it will be either AC97 or Axalia. I would not count much on Sound Storm two but it's still possible that Nvidia will announce such a plan.

Samples are expected in Q1 2005 and actual boards should appear later in the same quarter. Nvidia hasn't even disclosed Nforce 5 details to most of its partners but will have to tell them about the boards that they have to sell soon enough.

For more information, visit www.theinquirer.net.