by Anton Shilov
02/25/2005 | 02:58 PM
VIA Technologies, one of the world’s leading developers of core-logic chipsets, unveiled Friday its new K8N800A core-logic that sports variety of mobile processors from Advanced Micro Devices, such as Athlon 64 and Sempron, as well as the forthcoming Turion 64 chips expected to demonstrate the alluring balance between performance, capabilities and power consumption.
<%BANNER[article]%>“The power efficiency of the new VIA K8N800A chipset facilitates innovative lower profile design for AMD64 processor-based notebooks, and especially those powered by the forthcoming AMD Turion mobile technology,” said Chewei Lin, Vice President of Product Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc..
VIA K8N800A is a revamped version of the K8N800 chipset unveiled back in 2003. The new version provides more advanced input/output (I/O) capabilities and may sport some additional measures aimed to reduce power consumption, such as thinner manufacturing process. The K8N800 graphics and memory hub (GMCH) builds-in S3 Graphics UniChrome Pro integrated graphics processor, sports microprocessors with 800MHz HyperTransport bus, integrated UniChrome graphics core as well as optional AGP graphics. The GMCH may be coupled with VIA’s well-known VT8237 I/O controller.
VIA did not clearly reveal the difference between the K8N800 and K8N800A chips.
“With the K8N800A and AMD64 technology, customers can offer notebooks with unparalleled performance, multimedia, storage and connectivity options to meet the entertainment, creativity and productivity requirements of even the most demanding users,” Mr. Lin added.
AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology is designed for thin-and-light notebooks that boast with ultimately low power consumption, size and weight. While users of thin-and-light notebooks are not that concerned about performance than owners of mainstream and full-size laptops, AMD still wants to offer them 64-bit capability, something that is not available on the Centrino platforms from the arch-rival Intel Corp.. At this time AMD does not discuss peculiarities of its Turion 64 Mobile Technology. Actual products are expected to ship this Summer or earlier, but at this time AMD does not comment on their performance and feature-set.
The VIA K8N800A chipset is available now for orders, VIA said. But it is unclear who of the notebook makers plans to use the K8N800A.
ATI Technologies also recently announced a core-logic set to support AMD Turion 64. The company also provided a list of notebook makers to adopt the chipset.