VIA Technologies announced its K8T400M core-logic for AMD Opteron processors. Unlike NVIDIA, VIA positions its new chipset not only for 1-way workstations, but says it is suitable for firewall, cache and load balancing applications, as well as web hosting servers. 

VIA K8T400M is an ordinary chipset that consists of two chips and supports one Opteron processor. The North Bridge is basically just another AGP 8x tunnel because memory controller is located inside the CPU itself, while the South Bridge is VT8237 I/O controller supporting supports up to 6 PCI slots, 8 USB 2.0 ports, integrates 2-channel ATA-33/66/100/133 controller, features 2 Serial ATA-150 ports, 6-channel audio-solution, MC97 Modem as well as other important input/output means. It is interesting to note that VIA utilises its own V-Link interconnection to connect the bridges of the chipset, but not AMD’s Hyper-Transport technology.

No word about pricing and availability of the novelty.