VIA Technologies today made its first public demonstration of the VIA K8T800 chipset running the 64-bit MandrakeSoft 2.1 Server Operating System at booth #1776 at the LinuxWorld Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It transpired that VIA’s long-awaited K8T800 core-logic supports two additional 800MHz 32-bit HyperTransport links and supports Dual AMD Opteron processors configurations.

Earlier unofficial sources claimed that the K8T800 supported only one AMD Athlon 64 or AMD Opteron processors, but the reality appeared to be different. Last year a very-well known manufacturer of server equipment planned a VIA P4X400-based mainboard for two Intel Xeon processors, however, since VIA did not have license on the Quad Pumped Bus, the mainboard maker did not release the product. It looks like this year VIA is trying to enter the 2P server/workstation market again, but this time with AMD’s 64-bit processors.

VIA K8T800 AGP8x tunnel works in pair with the VIA VT8237 I/O controller.

The VIA K8T800 demo system is based on the new MS-9130 server mainboard produced by MSI.

VIA K8T800 and MSI’s MS-9130 are positioned as solutions for applications like web-servers, database deployment, application & file servers as well as for demanding design and engineering applications, including graphics rendering, data asset management and CAD based design.