VIA Company, which is the leading AMD chipset developer today, is not going to give away its position in the future. The latest company plans concerning the future AMD CPUs support indicate that once again. After the already familiar KT600 solution for Socket A, K8T400M and K8M400 for Athlon 64, there will be one more chipset with a much more advanced features set including PCI Express x16 and x4 support.

Speaking about VIA’s chipset plans for AMD processors in greater detail, I would like to point out that VIA is going to launch KT600 chipset for Socket A supporting Athlon XP processors with 200MHz, 266MHz, 333MHz and 400MHz bus very soon now. In fact this core logic set will be an improved version of the KT400A with the new 400MHz bus support. Therefore, its features will remain the same as by the predecessor: DDR266/333/400, ECC, AGP 4x/8x and 8x V-Link.

Besides, VIA has already prepared and launched into mass production two chipsets for Athlon 64 processors from AMD. They are K8T400M and K8M400. These two solutions are pin compatible and support AGP 4x/8x and V-Link 8x. The first one, K8T400M is a discrete chipset, while K8M400 is an integrated chipset with an UniChrome 2 graphics core onboard. The main features of this graphics core include: 8 to 64MB UMA frame buffer, 2 pixel pipes & 2 texture units, full MPEG2 decoder, DuoView, external DVI/TV-Out interface.

However, the most interesting chipset from VIA for Athlon 64 is planned for the beginning of next year. This solution is now known as K8 PCIE and should be a sort of response to Intel Grantsdale. It will support PCI Express bus for Athlon 64 platform. K8 PCIE will feature PCI Express 16x for the latest graphics cards and PCI Express 4x for expansion cards. Also this chipset will boast an improved bus between the chipset North and South Bridges: Ultra V-Link. This way it will allow using K8 PCIE with the future South Bridges supporting SerialATA, RAID, USB 2.0, high-quality 6-channel sound and Azalia Advanced Audio technology.