On Friday VIA finally announced its new Socket A chipset aka KT400. Everybody has been impatiently waiting for this announcement, because VIA KT400 was considered to be a highly promising solution. However, now that we know the specs, you might be pretty disappointed. As we have already warned you, KT400 was launched without the official support of the faster DDR400 SDRAM. But, it’s better without any support, rather than with the support they had by VIA P4X400 for Pentium 4.

Here are the basic features of the novelty:

• Supports AMD Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron with 200/266MHz bus;
• AGP 2x/4x/8x;
• Up to 4GB DDR200/266/333 SDRAM;
• 8X V-Link bus to connect the chipset North and South Bridges at 533MB/sec bandwidth;
• Advanced Communications Riser (ACR);
• Integrated 6-channel AC-97 sound;
• Integrated MC-97 modem;
• Integrated 10/100 Ethernet MAC;
• ATA 33/66/100/133;
• USB 2.0, 6 USB ports;
• ACPI/OnNow ;
• 664-pon BGA VT8368 North Bridge;
• 487-pin BGAVT8235 South Bridge.

I would like to point out that in addition to the official specifications, VIA KT400 allows setting the processor bus frequency at 333MHz and the memory bus frequency at 400MHz (200MHz DDR). So, it is quite possible that by the time Athlon XP processors with 333MHz bus are out (it should happen some time in October), VIA will announce that its KT400 is compatible with the new CPUs. Although, knowing VIA we can expect them to launch a new VIA KT400A chipset featuring exactly the notorious 333MHz bus official support. The same can be done regarding DDR400 memory as well. When JEDEC approves of the DDR400 standard (if ever), VIA will have either to say that KT400 is compatible with this standard or to release a new KT400 revision with the official support of this standard.

Speaking about the differences between VIA KT400 and VIA KT333 we should point out that besides the new AGP 8x interface and the support of faster V-Link bus, KT400 is said to feature an enhanced memory controller with higher performance. To prove the point VIA provides the results shown in Quake3, where the system on VIA KT400 appeared about 5% faster than the system with VIA KT333. Besides, they used an AGP 4x graphics accelerator, so that the system definitely owes its performance increase only to the enhanced memory controller.

As VIA claims, the mainboards based on the new KT400 solution should start shipping in September. The pricing hasn’t been revealed yet.

By the way, I would like to remind you that at present VIA dominates about 70% of the Socket A chipset market. 20% of this market is occupied by SiS and the remaining 10% - by NVIDIA, AMD, and ALi. VIA hopes that the launching of KT400 chipset will help them increase their market share even more or at least retain what’s they’ve got by now. At the same time I doubt that KT400 is a goof means of achieving this goal. In fact, this chipset is none other but a slightly improved KT333, and it yields in features to SiS746DX and SiS746FX, as well as to NVIDIA nForce2, which support 333MHz bus and DDR400 SDRAM. Anyway, time will dot all i’s.