No wonder, dual-processor mainboards based on VIA’s chipsets enjoy great popularity. They are comparatively cheap and manage to provide good performance and stability. This way, VIA’s first step in this field - a new dual-processor version of 694X chipset - turned out a success. A good deal of various of dual-processor mainboards built on this core logic stand for ample evidence. This fact has encouraged VIA to go on manufacturing more chipsets with SMP support for Low-End servers. In the nearest future a lot of companies plans to launch dual-processor mainboards based on VIA Apollo Pro266, DDR core logic for Socket 370. Many manufacturers have already created working samples of such products. Among them there are Iwill, Supermicro, EPoX, Gigabyte and Tyan.
The following Socket 370 chipset by VIA, Apollo Pro266T, which is a renovated version of Apollo Pro266T supporting Tualatin, will also support SMP configurations. As we learned, it’s Tyan who will be one of the first to launch Apollo Pro266T-based mainboards. In Q2 the company plans to release Tiger 266T (S2636) mainboard with two Socket 370 supporting Dual Tualatin as well. By the way, alongside with Tiger 266T Tyan thinks of creating a similar solution for Rack Mount servers.
But it is not the final word! VIA PX266 for Pentium 4 is awaited to offer dual-processor configurations too. It is noteworthy that Intel has so far kept silence about using 0.13-micron Pentium 4 Northwood in SMP systems. Still, some manufacturers include in their roadmaps dual-processor Pentium 4 mainboards built on VIA PX266 supporting Socket 478 CPUs and DDR SDRAM.