VIA’s officials talk at CeBIT that PX266 chipset for Intel Pentium 4 CPU is 100% ready to be launched anytime, but the company is not eager to do it right now. As a justification the officials point out low sales volumes of these CPUs.
Naturally, we should not disregard the fact that VIA hasn’t yet got Intel’s license to manufacture this chipset. Although the company’s officials allege that they don’t care about that at all, they had better not launch PX266 earlier than Brookdale (a Low-End chipset for Pentium 4 by Intel). Otherwise Intel would get mightily indignant.
It will be an absolutely different thing if VIA does it in the end of the year - by this time Brookdale is to become popular enough and Intel must grant VIA the license. As a matter of fact, the companies’ plan seems to be going like that: mainboards based on PX266 should appear no earlier than in November-December 2001, i.e., only two or three months before the boards based on the second version of Brookdale supporting DDR SDRAM come out.