VIA Technologies is reported to prepare a yet another onslaught on the market of high-performance personal computers and workstations with its new chipsets that sport “creams” of this Fall: 1066MHz processor system bus for Intel Pentium 4 chips, support for dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz and dual PCI Express slots for graphics cards.

VIA Rejigs Plans

One of the world’s largest designers of chipsets, VIA Technologies, is reportedly sending out its roadmap that covers its future plans to partners. The roadmap includes some new names along with specifications, Tom’s Hardware Guide web-site reports. The main news is that the company declares that it is planning to release chipsets that sport two slots for PCI Express graphics cards.

Two PCI Express x16 slots are require to install a pair of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800-series or GeForce 6600 GT graphics cards in order to set them work  in the so-called SLI Multi-GPU mode. SLI is a technology that enables two NVIDIA-based graphics cards to operate in a single workstation or PC delivering higher graphics horsepower.

The new plans of VIA Technologies include VIA PT894 and VIA PT894 PRO chipsets. Both are projected to support Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron processors with 800MHz or 1066MHz Quad Pumped Bus, dual-channel memory controller for DDR or DDR2 SDRAM memory at 400MHz and 667MHz speeds respectively. The difference between the PT894 and PT894 PRO is that the former only sports one PCI Express x16 and 1 PCI Express x4 lanes, while the latter bolsters dual PCI Express slots for graphics cards.

VIA will also offer dual PCI Express slots for graphics cards capability for high-end AMD platforms along with K8T890 PRO core-logic that will also sport 1000MHz HyperTransport bus for AMD Athlon 64, AMD Sempron and AMD Opteron processors. For mainstream computers powered by AMD’s chips the Taipei, Taiwan-based chipset maker is expected to release K8T890 and possibly K8M890 core-logic products that sport single PCI Express x16 slots and integrated graphics core (K8M890 only).

The PT894 chipsets will be sampled in September and will be produced in volume in the fourth quarter of the year. VIA’s K8T890 and K8M890 are being sampled now and will be also produced in business quantities in Q4 2004. The K8T890 PRO will be test-produced in August and mass-produced in September this year.

“While we do not comment on certain specific documents or plans, I can say that, based on the feedback we have received from the our customers, we have decided to develop a number of different variants of the PT890 Series and K8T890 Series chipset cores with different feature sets targeted at specific segments of the market. As a result of this, we are adopting a slightly different naming policy,” Richard Brown, Associate Vice President, International Marketing, for VIA Technologies told X-bit labs Friday.

AGP 8x/PCI Express x16 Platform Still Planned

VIA Technologies is known for its pretty frequent changes of plans. In early 2003 the company completely rejigged its core-logic roadmap cancelling certain products and adding some other into table. The company says that such transformations are conditioned by constant intention to serve needs of customers.

VIA reiterated plans to make a platform that sports both PCI Express x16 and AGP 8x slots.

“We are continuing engineering work on the AGP/PCI Express implementation and will be integrating this feature in future products in both the PT890 Series and K8T890 Series so that we can provide our customers with a complete family of solutions for different segments rather than a single “one-size-fits-all” PT890 and K8T890 product,” Richard Brown of VIA told X-bit labs.