VIA Technologies had confirmed its plans to roll-out the fastest core-logic for AMD Athlon XP with up to 400MHz FSB processors and to leave NVIDIA’s nForce2 Ultra 400 core-logic behind in terms of performance, Taiwanese DigiTimes web-site reported. The company is rumoured to release its KT880 product in late September or early October with probably demonstration of the part during Computex 2003 trade-show.

As the brand name suggests, the new core-logic from VIA with dual-channel memory controller inherits many features and capabilities from similar PT880 chipset for Intel Pentium 4 processors, primarily PC2700 and PC3200 support in dual-channel configurations as well as VIA VT8237 I/O controller, supporting 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, and may be considered as we even more feature-rich than nForce2 MCP-T from NVIDIA.

It seems that VIA Technologies has plans to bring itself its leading positions in the core-logic market back and is now very aggressive both in terms of product announcements and promotion. As we know, many mainboard makers adopt VIA’s affordable PT800 core-logic and even outdated P4M266 chipset these days, thus, I assume that VIA’s dual-channel PT880 may be welcomed very warmly by mainboard makers. We may suggest that VIA’s dual-channel should be a very effective one  given that it was in development for quite some time now and the actual products were postponed more than twice in the past.

Unfortunately for VIA, the era of Socket A as a powerful platform is rapidly approaching its sunset and there are concerns that the KT880 core-logic may become massively successful nowadays (see this news-story for more details).