X-bit labs

February 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

VIA Technologies is already showcasing its new South Bridge, the VT8251 chip. It looks quite weird: up to 8 Serial ATA devices, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 High Definition Audio, PCI Express. Mass production of such chips is expected to start next quarter. In fact, this is reasonable considering the vague situation with PCI Express cards. But after the marketing folk from Intel start their propaganda, the market may succumb. Sometimes they can do their job terribly good.

Anyway, VIA is boiling with optimism. They sold about 31-33 million chipsets last year, and are going to push this number as high as 45 million in 2004 to become the leader of the market. And this optimism comes after they lost 19% of their market share in 2003. However, this time the experiment is pure as VIA’s chipsets are “pure” legally.

The December results were not wonderful for the top four companies as sales slumped by 14-20% compared to November (this is largely due to the December holidays, though). As for the entire year, only ECS found itself completely on the losing side having lost 69% of its market share compared to 2002. The rest of the companies enlarged their shares: Gigabyte by 4%, ASUS by 12% and MSI by 20%.

They are all optimistic, too. All four are promising sales growths of 10-35% in 2004 (MSI and Gigabyte are more prudent in their estimates), while ASUS (with ASRock) and ECS promise more than 30%. Gigabyte hopes for 10% and I have no doubt they’ll make this. By the way, in February-March Gigabyte is going to announce its new trademark “Gigatrend”, which is in fact analogous to ASUS’ ASRock.

Memory

At last! The price of 256Mb DDR400 grew by 10-12% in the first two weeks of January. The demand was really on the rise, however slightly, due to several reasons: mainboards with dual-channel DDR SDRAM had been selling well and the manufacturers were willing to restock for the long celebration of the new Chinese year.

What was more surprising, the prices went up again after the holidays. Overall, they jumped from $3.7 to $4.65 for one 256Mb DDR400 chip. It’s quite an unrewarding job to try to make predictions about the prices of the spot market now. We just see that the open market of DDR has livened up somewhat, and the rest of the story will be in February.

A dead calm is in the market of extreme modules. Well, Corsair acted up with its 2GB module kits (registered, for the Athlon 64 FX) and PC3700 registered modules for the same processor. 500-533MHz modules from Kingston and OCZ are not thrilling anymore, while OCZ also released its PC-3200 Platinum Limited Edition EL DDR with 2-2-2-7 timings. I hope someone will feel the difference.