VIA Technologies announced a milestone of shipping 100 millionth chipset for platforms supporting AMD Athlon-series processors. The company and Advanced Micro Devices state this is a critical acclaim to VIA-AMD strategic partnership which began about 11 years ago.

“We are proud to have played such a prominent role in the amazing journey of the AMD platform. Systems featuring the powerful combination of a VIA chipset and AMD processor have met the needs of countless professionals, enthusiasts and everyday computer users all over the world. VIA will continue to work closely with AMD to offer innovative, high performance products, ensuring many more significant milestones in the years to come,” commented Wenchi Chen, President and CEO, VIA Technologies, Inc.

VIA first joined forces with AMD in 1994 with chipset support for the Am486DX2 running at 40MHz. This successful partnership resulted in spectacular chipset support for the AMD Athlon processor family and, as AMD processors continued to gain momentum in consumer and enterprise markets, the AMD64 platform, which was launched in 2003 for 32- and 64-bit computing. With successive generations of chipsets, VIA has delivered innovative features, stability and value to enable the AMD platform to maintain its industry leading position.

Throughout this time span, from the introduction of the acclaimed VIA KX133 chipset in 1999, to the recently announced VIA K8T890 PCI Express chipset, VIA chipsets have consistently introduced numerous advanced technologies to the AMD platform. Since the very first KX133 chipset left the building in late 1999, VIA Technologies has managed to ship over 100 million of core-logic products supporting AMD Athlon processors, supporting the market share and reputation growth of products by Advanced Micro Devices.

The core-logic chipset can be described as the central nervous system of a computer, typically handling communications between the system’s processor, memory, graphics ports, storage devices and other I/O connections. Being responsible for all communication between the system’s key components, the quality of the chipset design is a major factor in determining system performance and reliability.

VIA’s latest AMD64-supporting K8T890 chipset supports AMD Athlon 64, AMD Sempron and AMD Opteron processors in various form-factors, including chips with 800MHz and 1000MHz HyperTransport bus. The main peculiarity of VIA’s latest chipset is support for a PCI Express x16 lane for graphics cards and support for 4 PCI Express x1 lanes for other kinds of add-in cards by the North Bridge. VIA’s K8T890 can operate with outdated VT8237 I/O controller, or yet-to-be-launched VT8251 South Bridge.