X-bit labs

Chipsets: Latest VIA’s Plans.

Category: Other

by Anna Filatova

[ 06/29/2002 | 06:42 AM ]

Thanks to this site, we managed to find out some more interesting details about the nearest plans of VIA Technologies Company in the chipset field.

Of course, the most interesting info seems to be about the chipset solutions for the new 64bit AMD processors. According to VIA this family will include VIA K8T400, VIA K8T400M and VIA K8M400.

You are already very well familiar with the first chipset mentioned above, because VIA was showcasing a Hammer demo system at Computex working on this chipset. As you remember, its features are: AGP 8x support, 8x V-Link, VT8235 South Bridge. The mass shipments of this core logic are planned for Q3 2002. The chip will be made with 0.22micron manufacturing technology.

Other two solutions, K8T400M and K8M400 are of much greater interest to us. First of all, they will be manufactured with 0.15micron technology. Moreover, K8M400 will feature an integrated graphics core based on Zoetrope “Lite” and as a result will fully support UMA. Here VIA decided to go in NVIDIA’s footsteps and not to use the external graphics memory. The external AGP 8x slot will be supported. Both solutions will comply with all the modern standards, such as USB 2.0, ATA/133, 100MB Ethernet and 6-channel AC’97 sound.

The first samples of K8T400 should appear in July and those of K8M400 – in October this year. The mass production of K8T400 should begin in Q4 2002 and of K8M400 – in Q1 2003.

VIA hasn’t also forgotten about the regular 32bit Athlon XP processors: the company is going to start manufacturing KT400 in Q3 2002 for them. This chipset will also support AGP 8x and use VT8235 South Bridge.

We should also point out some interesting details about the Pentium 4 chipsets. As is known, VIA Technologies hasn’t yet receive Pentium 4 bus license from Intel, however, it has never prevented VIA from working on the new solutions for Pentium 4.

The most interesting solution currently is VIA P4X400 P4X600 and P4X800, I suppose. All of them will use 8x V-Link bus, VT8235 South Bridges, and will differ mostly by the supported memory type. If P4X400 simply adds support of faster DDR400 to the already implemented support of DDR333/266, then P4X600 and P4X800 are much more interesting from this point of view. The first one will have 2 DDR333/266 memory channels and 128bit memory bus (hello, nForce!). The second one will support new DDR II memory. The first samples of the new P4X600 are expected in July and the mass production is planned for Q3 2002.

P4X800 will appear much later, there is no exact info about its schedule. We only know that mass production is planned for H1 2003.

As for the solutions with the integrated graphics adapter, they will be identical to what is already produced for Athlon, as we have actually supposed. Their features will be pretty standard and similar to those of the discrete solutions. They will also have a built-in Zoetrope graphics core.