X-bit labs

February 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 5)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 02/23/2004 | 06:37 PM ]

We should wait for a while yet for the new generation of integrated chipsets to appear. The 915G will show up closer to the summer, while the 915GV and 910GL will arrive in the second half of the year only. The 910GL will support Socket 478, so today’s Celerons shouldn’t be dismissed altogether. Future Celerons will also work with this chipset as it promises support of FSB533.

The competitors are making ready with their answers. ATI will present its 400 series in the second half of the year, too, when the full-fledged RS400 comes out with a DirectX 9 core and support of dual-channel DDR/DDR2 and PCI Express. Its cut-down versions are called RC400 and RU400. The former will have one of the memory channels disabled, while the latter will also lack support of PCI Express. VIA Technologies is planning to release an integrated version of the PT890 this year. The PM890 will feature VIA’s own graphics core derived from the DeltaChrome. SiS is slow again: the SiS662, an integrated version of the SiS656, will be sampled in the summer and will come out in the fall.

There’s one more thing about integrated chipsets. It has now become popular to develop a miniature mainboard on such a chipset and install, or even solder up, this or that mobile processor. In January we saw the ECS L7VMM3, which is a combination of the KM266 and the mobile Athlon XP 1400+, and the EPoX IP-4MTS2B (Pentium M/i855GM).

A special product in this area comes from Freetech: mainboards on integrated chipsets (i865G and i845GV) for ordinary processors (including Prescott). The manufacturer employed VIA’s etBIOS technology to play audio and video discs without booting the OS. The idea is exciting, although it doesn’t seem quite to the point – you won’t get less noise anyway.

Now let’s turn to solutions for AMD processors. They were scanty in January, save for a few mainboards on the nForce3 250 chipset that were demonstrated by AOpen, Chaintech and DFI at CES. The companies belong to the middle class and there’s no one from the “top four” to showcase the nForce3 250. No name from the top four and overall there are few names. Well, that’s quite understandable, since there is the K8T800 that has been supporting Serial ATA-150 for long.

It starts looking as if the things that happened in the last year were VIA’s misfortune rather than NVIDIA’s success. And this is quite a sudden turn of the plot. At least, this is what the persisting problems NVIDIA has with its South Bridges imply. By the way, South Bridges may become a hot topic in this year. First, each chipset for the Athlon 64 is in fact a South Bridge. Second, DDR2 won’t be a real thing in 2004, so South Bridges may become the crucial factor in evaluating chipsets for the Pentium 4 platform.

That’s where SiS comes onto the scene. In the middle of January they announced their SiS965L, their first South Bridge with support of PCI Express, 7.1 audio and compatible with the majority of North Bridges the company already has, ranging from SiS648FX to SiS760. There’s only one problem – there’re no PCI Express cards announced yet (I don’t count in graphics card that don’t support x1 PCI Express ports anyway). This chip will come into mass production no sooner than May. Its successor, the SiS966, with support of Intel High Definition Audio (Azalia) will appear in the fall when the integrated SiS662 shows up.