by Anna Filatova
05/22/2002 | 10:00 PM
VIA keeps up with the good tradition of launching new chipsets, which hardly differ from the predecessors. Today the company announced the launching of new VIA P4X266E chipset, which differs from VIA P4X266A by… exactly! Only by the implemented support of the new 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus and a new VIA VT8235 South bridge (P4X266A goes with VT8233A South Bridge), which is just the same as that of the fastest chipset in this family (VIA P4X333). The North Bridge of VIA P4X266E is manufactured with 0.122 micron technology by TSMC. Its wholesale price is not reported, but we suppose it should be around $20-$25.
However, we are not going to be too strict to VIA now, because Intel is doing absolutely the same thing: i850E is none other but the same i850 with the 533MHz QP bus support and semi-official PC1066 RDRAM support.