by Anton Shilov
08/21/2003 | 10:39 AM
VIA 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.
<%BANNER[article]%>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.