X-bit labs

X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 1 (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/11/2005 | 01:38 PM ]

VIA Technologies: K8T890, PT-Series Gain Acceptance Among Mainboard Makers

The former leader of the chipset market, who has been having execution-related issues for a number of years now seems to be coming back.

The company’s spokesman Richard Brown said the company has tackled the execution-related problems that led to severe stretch of VIA PT-series as well as K8T890-series chipsets time-to-market. This may be correct, as the company shows a number of actual mainboards powered by the mentioned core-logic sets in its booth. While this may not necessarily mean that all the companies who display the platforms will come out with commercial products, this may indicate relative interest mainboard makers express towards VIA PT-series as well as K8T890-series chipsets.

It is interesting to note that few mainboards based on VIA’s K8T890 that allows to install PCI Express and AGP graphics cards into one system actually feature two slots for graphics cards. In fact, only Biostar, EPoX and MSI do offer two types of slots for graphics cards, whereas ABIT, Albatron, ASUS, Chaintech, Gigabyte Technology, Jetway and Soltek offer mainboards only with PCI Express x16 slot.

On the Intel side, AGP 8x-PEG x16 platforms are far more popular: all the mainboards presented – from ABIT, Albatron, ASUS, ASRock, Biostar, ECS, EPoX, Gigabyte Technology, Jetway and Soltek – featured two slots for different graphics cards.

VIA established shipments of the K8T890 for AMD64 chips only recently, while the PT-series products for Intel’s Pentium 4 processors are beginning their ramp right now. Therefore, actual mass availability of the PT-series powered products is still a couple of month away.