by Anton Shilov
08/24/2002 | 04:30 AM
It is already a widely known fact that AMD launches its new processors with 333MHz FSB in October this year so to make a company for the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processors unveiled in late October or early November. Although the final decision about 333MHz bus was made quite recently, it seems that transition from the old platforms to the new that support this renovation will be quite easy and without any shocks, as chipset-developers are generally ready with their solutions.
VIA, who still manages to hold about 70% of Socket A chipsets market has included appropriate PCI and AGP FSB dividers for the mentioned system bus even in their KT333 core-logic, announced in Spring. Although mainboard makers were quiet about this feature in their manuals, several enthusiasts have found this out, thus, we can claim that the support is unofficial. No need to tell, that being unable to make DDR400 function stable on KT400, VIA is glad to offer official support for the faster processor bus. The actual VIA KT400 powered products shipping is scheduled on the next week, so, provided that mainboard manufacturers are not afraid of declaring 333MHz bus, VIA has all chances to become the first chipset developer to officially offer this feature to the users.<%BANNER[article]%>
SiS, who does not have so big Socket A portfolio as its Taiwanese neighbour does, also plans to launch their new SiS746 family of products. The line is rumoured to consist of three “pseudo-different” chipsets:
There is also NVIDIA, who was first to declare 333MHz system bus support and who starts shipping their nForce2 in late August or early September. This quite new Santa-Clara based core-logic developer is comparatively strict with their product family on this market and will offer one discrete and one integrated platform processing units both supporting 333MHz FSB and dual-channel DDR400 memory.
Earlier this year we doubted if AMD could move to 333MHz FSB because if they had, they would not have appropriate dual-processors core-logic solution for such processors. Well, in October - January timeframe AMD launches its ClawHammer and dual-processor configurations supporting ClawHammer DP in the first quarter of 2003. Since their primary target is high-end desktops, AMD has little to loose on the server front, hence, the company will simply make their clients to wait a month or two for the new platform to arrive, without updating the old one.
As we see, almost all chipset-makers, except ALi, already have their solutions for the upcoming processors from AMD introduced. As soon as all of them start shipping appropriate chips, mainboard makers will be able to renew their product lines. Keeping in mind that there are about two month before the announcement of the CPUs with faster bus, manufacturers will not have to rapidly cut their prices down in order to clear the stocks out as fast as possible. However, in case there are delays with these new chipsets, the situation will be totally different for the mainboard-suppliers.