X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 7)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 01/08/2004 | 11:51 PM ]

Intel was furious at the sign of the riot so the manufacturers had to come up with their own names. As for the winner of this naming contest, I guess MSI should be awarded for its “Memory Acceleration Technology – MAT”. Intel ultimately gave up and banged the door saying they didn’t recommend buying such mainboards from its own partners. PAT was rooted out of the i865PE completely.

However, this is not the only trimming this chipset model underwent in its history. Notwithstanding all its advantages, it was quite expensive at first, before traditional price cuts, and didn’t meet Intel’s expectations concerning the sales volumes. The junior member of the 865 family, the i865P chipset, proved to be of no use for the market. So a new version of the i865PE was presented in the fall with a disabled second memory channel. The new i848P, an ideal mainstream offer, resembled the old i845PE, and differed from it mainly by the support of 800MHz system bus used in the new Pentium 4 processor models.

Intel took its time with licensing the new bus, so there appeared rumors about Intel having no plans to license it to any of the Taiwanese manufacturers. In April, however, the pause ended abruptly as Intel settled its argument with VIA Technologies. The cross-licensing they agreed upon, gave VIA the access to the 800MHz QPB.

Immediately VIA pulled up prices for all of its now-legitimate chipsets so that the price reflected the increased self-cost (because of the licensing fees), and also renamed them (the company played with chipset names throughout the entire year). Anyway, those chipsets belonged to days long gone, and some interest to VIA’s products arose only with the announcement of the PT800 (that was a good old P4X400 with the 800MHz QPB support). As a result, big sharks like MSI or Soltek issued their mainboards on the VIA chipset for the first time in years.

The PT800 is an alternative (quite interesting due to its much lower price) to the i848P, but for VIA to compete with the i865PE, they needed a dual-channel chipset with the 800MHz QPB. This they planned to present in May-June as samples of the PT880. In fact, the chipset only showed up in September, but without much sensation. Probably, VIA had problems implementing the SerialATA interface in the VT8237 South Bridge – there was something wrong there. As a result, first mainboards on the PT880 somehow made it into stores by the end of the last year only.

Now that the legal problems are over, there is hope that the next generation of VIA chipsets for the Pentium 4 will arrive according to the schedule. As for VIA’s processors, there are no problems at all and they are quite active in producing mainboards for them as well. The EPIA platform, which is now the focus of VIA’s VPSD division, has been developing quite rapidly with an interesting result: the Nano ITX form-factor (12x12cm). I am eager to see how it will develop in 2004 as I am sure this form-factor is destined to grow popular.