Make Home Page
Add to Favorites
Print article
Send link to friend
Digg this
Post to del.icio.us
Post to SlashdotVIA Technologies still has plans to introduce a Socket A chipset with dual-channel memory controller, an Asian web-site OC WorkBench revealed today. The source claims that the information had been received from mainboard manufacturers, suggesting that the latter already work with actual samples of the device.
Information about VIA’s chipset with dual-channel memory controller for AMD Athlon XP microprocessors has been floating around since the beginning of the year (see this news-story) and seemed to be pretty logical. Given that VIA Technologies plans to offer an Intel Pentium 4 intended chipset PT880 with dual-channel DDR SDRAM as well as QBM memory support this September, there should be no problems with integrating the same memory controller into a
Keeping in mind VIA’s recent intention to regain its strong positions in the chipset market, the company definitely needs various products for high-end, mainstream and value markets. Currently VIA has no core-logic products to compete with NVIDIA’s nForce2 Ultra 400 and it seems to be logical for VIA to release such a competitor. On the other hand, the Socket A market is shrinking quickly and it is more critical for the company to address Socket 478 and Socket 754/940 platforms so to rapidly boost market share and occupy prospective and expanding markets. In this case the release of a higher-end Socket A chipset now will do nothing positive for VIA simply because very few consumers will be interested in an expensive Socket A solution late this year or early next year.
In case VIA Technologies really plans to roll-out a dual-channel Socket A chipset, expect the announcement to happen this September during Computex Taipei 2003 trade-show. Surely, it would be more sensible to anticipate VIA to attack the Socket 478 and Athlon 64/Opteron platforms more aggressively.
