It is impossible to doubt that VIA Technologies is the leading core-logic developer for the Socket A market. SiS constantly delays its chipsets, usually offering an outdated or rather slow solution, NVIDIA launches something quite expensive once a year and also cannot win a significant market share from VIA. This year NVIDIA promised to offer its nForce2 chipset for a reasonable price, so, the only thing that is needed to be done for them now is to start the volume-shipments of their product.

According to both official and unofficial statements, NVIDIA’s partners will start to sell nForce2 based mainboards in a number of weeks, as a result, the crown of performance leader on the Socket A market will go to the Santa Clara-based GPU developer, since VIA KT400 is definitely slower compared to the NVIDIA’s core-logic.

What VIA has to do in order to compete with the newcomer successfully? Perhaps, to launch something more powerful. But what, keeping in mind that the KT400 is said to be the last core-logic for Athlon XP platform? If KT400 was expected to be the last Socket A chipset from VIA, they probably do not have anything new to showcase this year. Hence, it is logical for them to update the current version of their product – VIA KT400. In fact, that is what they do. According to this web-site, Iwill will soon launch three new mainboards for the Socket A platform, one of them will be based on the KT400A chipset. The information is unconfirmed, but looks rather logically.

I should admit that there is no information about VIA KT400A in VIA’s roadmap dated 2nd October. However, considering the fact that AMD will supply about 33 million of its K7 processors in a year time, VIA will simply have to offer something new in 2003 for the Socket A market in order to compete with the rivals. I have no idea what will it be, though.