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VIA Changed its Chipset Plans: What to Expect and What Not to Expect

by Anton Shilov
02/05/2003 | 07:55 PM

VIA Technologies has recently changed its chipset roadmap again reflecting the overall market situation. Unfortunately for VIA, even the most-advanced specifications cannot bring them their market share on the chipset front back as Intel simply does not want any company to utilise VIA’s Pentium 4 intended core-logic products, while the Pentium 4 CPUs continue to win market share from AMD Athlon XP CPUs, so, the market where VIA can lead declines, while the market that is almost closed for VIA expands. Pity, isn’t it? Below you will find the list of core-logic products we expect to come this year.

Intel Pentium 4 intended North Bridges:

PT400: 400/533/800MHz Quad Pumped Bus; PC2100/PC2700/PC3200 (DDR400) DDR SDRAM, ECC, AGP 8x, 8x V-Link, accompanied by VT8235 I/O controller. Sampling: this quarter. Availability: second quarter or earlier.
PM400: 400/533MHz Quad Pumped Bus; PC2100/PC2700/PC3200 (DDR400) DDR SDRAM, ECC, AGP 8x, integrated Castle Rock II graphics core; 8x V-Link, accompanied by VT8235 I/O controller. Sampling: first quarter. Availability: first half of the year.
PT600: 400/533/800MHz Quad Pumped Bus; dual-channel PC2100/PC2700/PC3200 (DDR400) DDR SDRAM and Quad Band Memory support (see this news-story for more details about the technology), ECC, AGP 8x, 8x V-Link, accompanied by VT8235 I/O controller. Sampling: now. Availability: first half of the year.
PT800: 400/533/800MHz Quad Pumped Bus; dual-channel PC2100/PC2700/PC3200 (DDR400) DDR SDRAM and Quad Band Memory support, ECC, AGP 8x, 8x V-Link, accompanied by newer and more advanced VT8237 I/O controller. Sampling: first quarter. Availability: first half of the year.

There will be a bunch of new chipsets for the Pentium 4 platform in the first half of the year from VIA and Intel (note: no info about SiS at all!). Although currently VIA’s market share is low, it seems that the company has plans to compete with all chipsets Intel will offer. The PT800 is targeted on the segment of i875P, while PT600 will fight against i865PE and the PT400 will try to beat the i865P. Of course, VIA does not seriously try to compete against Intel in corporate sector: there are no rivals for i865GE at all, while the PM400 will still compete against i845G/i845GE.<%BANNER[article]%>

AMD Athlon XP intended North Bridges:

KT400A: 200/266/333MHz EV-6 Bus; PC2100/PC2700/PC3200 (DDR400) DDR SDRAM, AGP 8x, 8x V-Link, accompanied by VT8235 I/O controller. Sampling: now. Availability: this quarter. The pseudo-new core-logic for Socket A processors will provide more efficient memory controller and broad range of memory/FSB configurations (e.g. you will be able to work with 266MHz FSB and clock memory at 400MHz and so on).
KM400: 200/266/333MHz EV-6 Bus; PC2100/PC2700 DDR SDRAM, AGP 8x, integrated Castle Rock graphics core, 8x V-Link, accompanied by VT8235 I/O controller. Sampling: now. Availability: first half of the year.

AGP tunnels for Athlon 64 platform.

K8T400: AGP 8x, 8x V-Link.
K8T400M: AGP 8x, 8x V-Link. This one will be pin-to-pin compatible with K8M400 and will become the first pseudo-new chipset for K8 platform from VIA.
K8M400: AGP 8x, 8x V-Link. Castle Rock II integrated graphics core.

All three chipsets will come on the market when AMD Athlon 64 processors make their appearance. Since this bright day is not going to happen until September this year, expect all three to receive VT82737 I/O controller by the time of appearance, as VIA does not like to produce a number of different devices with almost same capabilities.

The K8T400 was originally intended as a fast-to-market solution for x86-64 chips in Fall 2002. Now I can hardly imagine for what does VIA need this AGP Tunnel in Fall 2003, hence, it seems that the family of chipset will shrink by the time of the appearance.

Some more information in regards graphics cores.

Castle Rock: 1 rendering pipeline with 2 TMUs, 8-64MB of UMA frame-buffer, DirectX 7/8 compatibility, DuoView, TV-Out, motion compensation engine.
Castle Rock II: 2 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs per each, 8-64MB of UMA frame-buffer, DuoView, TV-Out, iDCT, MPEG2 hardware decoder, 200MHz frequency.

More details about I/O controllers.

VT8235: 8x V-Link, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 6-channelAC'97 sound, ATA-33/66/100/133, 10/100 Ethernet PHY, Home PNA and so on. Already widely available.
VT8237: Ultra Link, two Serial ATA-150 ports + extra couple when using an additional PHY chip, RAID support (as you see, not only Intel offers integrated RAID controllers in their I/O chips), ATA-33/66/100/133, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 6-channel audio, 10/100 Ethernet PHY, Home PNA and so on. Sampling: first quarter. Availability: first half of the year.

In short, there are plans that transform every day, there are chipsets invented by the engineers, but there are very few mainboards powered by VIA’s chipsets in stores. So, should we expect VIA's market share to skyrocket?

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