ASUS has finally officially made the situation with its A7M266 DDR mainboard based on AMD-760 chipset clear to everybody (see our review here). As we read over at AMD Zone, ASUS would very soon stop shipping this mainboard. However, the company isn’t planning to call all the boards back at all. A7M266 doesn’t suffer any stability or other problems and is a very high-quality product. The problem is that AMD is simply going to terminate the supplies of their AMD-760 chipset to the mainboard manufacturers, which will force ASUS to stop producing this product. The reasons that pushed AMD to this move are lying on the surface, actually: AMD-760 has already contributed to the promotion of the DDR technology and now it has to give way to ALi MAGiK 1 and VIA KT266 chipsets, which can boast much more diverse features. In other words, the well-known situation with AMD-750 chipset repeats: AMD doesn’t want to be known as a chipset supplier and prefers concentrating on the CPU development and production.
As for ASUS A7M mainboard, even though it won’t be shipped any more, ASUS will keep supporting this product. At the same time ASUS will do its best to promote another Socket A DDR solution: a cheaper A7A266 mainboard on ALi MAGiK 1 chipset and supporting both: PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM and PC133 SDRAM.