Just a couple of hours after the press revealed the latest Intel’s roadmap (see this news-story), AMD’s (un)officials told Anand from AnandTech web-site that the company will launch its Barton processors with 400MHz Front-Side Bus in addition to their less advanced models.

Given that Intel is as aggressive as never before, AMD decided to offer Athlon XP “Barton” processors with 400MHz FSB in order to boost the performance of those CPUs. According to the statements, the increase in speed is pretty significant, hence, there is a lot of sense in producing such microprocessors in order to compete with Hyper-Threading enabled Pentium 4 processors from Intel.

Apparently, VIA KT400A (note to those, who doubt: the brand-name is not important at this point) is a dual-channel Socket A chipset with 200MHz system bus support. They say that NVIDIA’s nForce2 can also provide 200MHz FSB, hence, there are already two platforms for the new AMD processors available. I wonder which of them is the fastest, by the way. VIA KT400A powered mainboards should be available early next year.

The information is not confirmed by AMD officials, but we already managed to get the confirmation on the Socket A dual-channel DDR SDRAM-supporting VIA core-logic from one of our Taiwanese sources, thus, we can also expect the info regarding the new CPUs from AMD to be precise enough.