VIA Technologies announced its another chipset with integrated graphics core for AMD Athlon XP and Duron processors. The new VIA KM400 comes to replace VIA KM266 core-logic and has very much in common with VIA KN400 announced in early March (see March 13, 2003 news-story).

VIA ProSavage KM400 supports all Socket A CPUs with 200, 266 and 333MHz EV-6 system bus, as well as up to 4GB of PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory, just like the KT400A and the KN400. The main advantage VIA KM400 brings is integrated S3 Graphics’ UniChrome 2D/3D AGP graphics core with built-in MPEG-2 decoder and DuoView technology for multi-monitor support, though, KM400 also features external AGP 8x graphics port for those, who do not feel satisfaction with the integrated graphics core. VIA KM400 will include VIA VT8237 I/O controller with support for up to 6 PCI slots, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 2-channel ATA-33/66/100/133 controller, 4 Serial ATA-150 ports, 6-channel audio-solution, MC’97 modem and other important input/output capabilities.

Although KM400 core-logic and KN400 chipset intended for mobile applications resemble each other very closely after looking though the list of their features, according to VIA, KM400 and KN400 utilise different North Bridges. For instance, KN400 is marked as VIA VT8373, while KM400 is marked as VIA VT8378, even though they both utilise 552-pin HSBGA packaging.

At the moment it is hard to tell whether VIA’s chipsets with integrated graphics cores are successful or not nowadays. For instance, I have not heard of any first-tier PC-vendors utilising VIA’s solutions with integrated graphics, moreover, there are very few mainboards based on KM266 and other chipsets alike on the market. Meanwhile HP utilises NVIDIA’s nForce chipsets in its computers and there are quite a lot of mainboards based on the nForce2 IGP core-logic with integrated GeForce4 MX core. Summing both facts, we can come to a conclusion that NVIDIA is forcing out VIA little-by-little from this market, however, with no precise figures I cannot say it for sure.

VIA Technologies has not issued any pricing or availability details at press time.