Taiwanese mainboard manufacturers are impatiently waiting for the 8th generation processors from AMD – Hammer. Today we got another proof of the point. In the roadmap of one of the leading mainboard makers, ASUS Company, we saw that 7 products out of the 19 new ones planned for the year 2002 are intended for Socket475 AMD ClawHammer. Moreover, ASUS is going to have much more new solutions for AMD processors rather than for Intel’s ones.

So, let’s take a closer look at ASUS’ plans. For the Pentium 4 family the company is going to introduce new solutions with the support of 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, AGP 8x and DDR333 memory. It will be ASUS P4S8X/E based on SiS648 chipset and ASUS P4A8X/E on ALi M1681 chipset. They will also launch an integrated MicroATX DDR266 solution aka P4BGL-VM on i845GL supporting no external AGP slot. Later in Q4 2002 another pair of integrated solutions will crop up. These will be SiS650 based P4A8X-VM and P4A8X-FX supporting external AGP 8x graphics accelerators.

As for Socket A platform, in Q3 ASUS will announce a few solutions supporting DDR333/DDR400 memory and AGP 8x slot: A7N8X based on NVIDIA Crush 17, A7V8X on VIA KT400, A7A8X built on ALi M1667 and A7S8X on SiS746. The company will also launch integrated A7V333-VM based o KM333 featuring Zoetrope graphics core and MicroATX A7V8X-M on VIA KT400.

And now come the most exciting details. The Q4 will become the ClawHammer time. For this processor ASUS is going to release the following products: K8M on AMD chipset, K8V on VIA K8HTB, K8A based on ALi 1687 and K8S based on SiS755. Besides, the company is also planning a few integrated solutions: K8N on a very promising NVIDIA chipset, K8S-VM on SiS760 and K8A-VM on ALi M1688.

So, judging by this info, there will be no deficit of Socket745 mainboards. Moreover, ASUS is planning to announce a new Terminator barebone system with ClawHammer processor. This system will go as A8VC and will be built with MicroATX A7V8X-N mainboard on VIA K8HTB chipset.