X-bit labs

VIA Makes Another Attempt to Re-Enter Chipset Market.

Category: Chipsets

by Anton Shilov

[ 11/22/2005 | 02:51 PM ]

VIA Technologies on Tuesday formally announced its yet another chipset designed for high-end and mainstream personal computers running AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Sempron processors. The announcement is a yet another attempt to re-enter the market now dominated by companies like ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corp.

“The VIA K8T900 chipset continues a strong path of support for all market segments of the AMD platform,” commented Chewei Lin, vice president of product marketing, VIA Technologies.

VIA K8T900 chip supports AMD Athlon 64-series processors with 1GHz HyperTransport bus, PCI Express x16 lane for graphics that can be split between two graphics cards when operating in multi-GPU mode, PCI Express x4 lane for add-in cards, such as network adapters. VIA said that its subsidiary’s S3 Graphics’ Chrome S27 graphics processors would be able to run in tandem on VIA K8T900 core-logic-based mainboards.

The new chip from VIA is to be accompanied by the company’s new VT8251 I/O controller that supports PCI, PCI Express slots, Serial ATA-300, Parallel ATA-133, USB 2.0, integrated audio, built-in Ethernet and other enhancements.

Neither of recently announced high-end chipsets from VIA Technologies aimed at AMD64 platform, such as K8T890-series products, were adopted massively. With the K8T900 the company may have hopes to regain positions. However, the designer did not mention of a single mainboard maker to be planning products that utilise VIA K8T900 core-logic.

VIA K8T900 is expected to be available in volume quantities in Q1 2006, the company indicated. Currently mainboard designers may request samples and pricing.