Chip firm Nvidia has previewed a version of its nForce motherboard chipsets that will support Intel processors in place of AMD chips. The product, due later this year, will bring to Intel-based desktops features such as Nvidia's hardware firewall and support for dual graphics adapters.

Nvidia demonstrated its technology at March's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and said it expects to start rolling out the chipset by April 2005. The company has yet to announce an official name for the product, which has been informally dubbed nForce for Intel.

Current nForce chipsets support AMD chips, but Nvidia last year signed a licensing agreement with Intel allowing it to make chipsets for Intel processors too. A spokesman for Nvidia said the forthcoming chipset would include "pretty much all" of the features in the current nForce chipsets for AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron chips.

Among the technologies Nvidia demonstrated was its Scalable Link Interface (SLI). This lets users connect two Nvidia PCI Express graphics cards into a system with an nForce motherboard.

HP last month shipped its xw9300 workstation based on the nForce Professional chipset and AMD processors. This can be fitted with dual graphics adapters to speed image processing work.

The nForce for Intel chipset will also feature Nvidia's Secure Networking Engine (SNE) firewall circuitry, the firm said. In the existing nForce4 chipset, the SNE performs stateful inspection on data packets coming in from the integrated Gigabit Ethernet adapter, offloading this task from the processor.

Nvidia's Drew Henry said that nForce for Intel will initially be aimed at PC enthusiasts, who are often early adopters of technologies that will become mainstream in the future. However, features such as the dual graphics support and hardware firewall are also likely to attract interest from business buyers - if enterprise vendors use the technology in Intel-based workstations.

Nvidia also demonstrated how nForce enables a second hard drive to be plugged into the system, and easily configured to protect data on the first hard drive should a failure occur, Henry said.

Nvidia also intends to demonstrate the forthcoming chipset at the Cebit IT trade show in Hanover, Germany later this week.