Saw this on digitimes.

http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20060626PR204.html

Intel leaving high-end gaming chipset market to ATI and Nvidia


Although Intel plans to roll out the Bearlake chipset family in the second quarter of 2007 to upgrade its 965 series chipsets, which were only introduced this month, the company will not deliver a follow-up version of the 975X chipset before the end of the first half of next year, sources that have reviewed Intel's latest product roadmap indicated.

The sources indicated that Intel was leaving the high-end chipset market open in order to attract companies that own dual-graphics technology, such as Nvidia's SLI and ATI Technologies' CrossFire, to develop their own high-end chipset solutions for the Intel platform and reduce those companies' focus on the AMD platform, the sources noted.

In addition, although Intel has reached a licensing agreement with ATI to allow its 955X and 975X chipsets to support ATI's dual-graphics technology, the agreement has been discontinued from Intel's 965 chipsets onward, sources at Taiwan motherboard makers indicated. Nvidia's SLI technology is not officially supported on any of those chipsets, the sources added.

In line with Intel's Conroe launch, ATI will introduce a CrossFire-compliant PCI Express X16 chipset, the RD600, according to the sources.

Nvidia's nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition platform, which consists of the C51XE northbridge partnered with the MCP55 southbridge, will initially be released to the market to support Intel's upcoming Conroe processors, indicated the sources. In the fourth quarter of 2006, Nvidia will launch an upgraded version of the C51XE, the C55 northbridge chip, which supporta a 1333MHz FSB and DDR2-800 of memory, the sources added.