Some time ago we told you that Pentium 4 chipsets from VIA theoretically support dual-processor configurations. However, until recently, none of the mainboard makers dared to design a dual-processor solution for Intel Pentium 4 CPUs built on NetBurst architecture using a VIA chipset. Firstly, the illegal status of the VIA chipsets prevented the manufacturers from even considering this possibility, and secondly, this promised to be a pretty exotic solution with unknown marketing prospects. Nevertheless, now things are moving.

As we read over here, AOpen roadmap appeared to have a dual-processor mainboard for Intel Xeon CPUs based on the new VIA P4X400 chipset. The outstanding novelty is called DXP7R.

The mainboard is equipped with 2 Socket604 for Intel Xeon processors and 4 DIMM slots for DDR333/DDR266 SDRAM. There is an AGP 8x slot and 5 32bit/33MHz PCI slots. In other words, AOpen decided to refrain from using VIA VPX-64 chip responsible for the support of 64bit 66MHz PCI slots implementation. Besides that there will also be an integrated Intel 82551 network solution and an ATA/133 RAID controller from Promise.

Of course, dual-processor mainboard for Intel Xeon based on VIA chipset is a highly original solution, but to tell the truth I cannot think of the user groups that would be interested in using this kind of solution. Xeon CPUs are expensive server processors, so that I really doubt that anyone will be willing to get a low-cost mainboard for the, based on the disgraced chipset, which officially doesn’t support dual-processor configurations. I suppose that AOpen also understands it. So, I dare believe that the announcements about the possible launch of this DXP7R solution are just a marketing trick aimed at demonstrating highly professional skills of AOpen engineering team.