Yesterday VIA made an official press-release announcing their desire to invite over 30 manufacturers to Taipei on 7 February, so that to give them an opportunity to test the compatibility of their products with VIA’s new IEEE 1394 (Firewire) controller aka VIA Fire II (VT6306).
Strange as it might seem, but we couldn’t recall VIA ever mentioning a chip like that as one of their future products. We have told you that VIA is planning to introduce USB 2.0 controller chip, VT1221 (which is a competitor to Firewire, actually), but we never mentioned anything about VIA Fire II. Moreover, since we are lucky to see new VIA roadmaps from time to time, we noticed that this notorious chip is not on the company’s roadmap yet. Doesn’t it seem too mysterious???
Anyway, launching a chip like that (which should be selling to the mainboard manufacturers at a relatively low price) will undoubtedly push forward this promising technology.