Although VIA’s plans for H2 2001 concerning DDR chipsets for Pentium 4 have been the talk of the town recently, we would like to draw your attention to the fact, that VIA hasn’t yet managed to get Pentium 4 bus license from Intel. It means that PX266 may theoretically never come out, if VIA doesn’t reach a compromise with Intel. Today the position of this Taiwanese chipset maker is somewhat self-confident: "With our having a 45 percent market share, no CPU vendor can neglect us." Well, time will show whether Intel can or can’t do it. And in the meanwhile, ATI and ServerWorks have already received Pentium 4 bus license from Intel. ATI is in charge of developing an integrated Pentium 4 chipset, while ServerWorks is preparing a server chipset supporting dual-Foster configurations with DDR SDRAM.
Some more interesting stuff on the matter appeared here. ALi, Micron and NVIDIA are said to be also very much excited about developing Pentium 4 chipsets. However, Micron is the only one of the three who is very optimistic and claims that they will sign an agreement with Intel next month.
However, all the chipsets by third manufacturers will evidently come out later than Intel Brookdale, a Pentium 4 chipset supporting PC133 SDRAM. According to the latest news from Intel, Brookdale is to announced in the end of Q2.