Acer Laboratories Company (Ali), which has almost refused from the production of desktop chipsets because of some troubles with products for Athlon (K7), is currently presenting its M1687 together with its own latest I/O controller.

We would like to remind you that M1687 supports AGP 8X port (though, for some reason, the reference board has a port with an AGP 2X key), and it is connected with the South Bridge by HyperTransport. M1563 I/O controller supports two ATA-133 channels, 6 USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, memory stick interface, SD and some other in-out ports, obligatory for a modern computer.

VIA Technologies is also presenting a mainboard based on its K8HTA. By the way, although this mainboard is not working, yet, it seems to be more finished than any of its competitors.

All chipsets of the K8HT line from VIA will support AGP 8X, V-Link 533 MB/sec, USB 2.0, etc. Besides, versions with integratred video, Serial ATA and some other useful features will appear. Thus, VIA’s Hammer plans are to be long and serious.

SiS Company is presenting a prototype of the mainboard, based on the chipset with a SiS755 North Bridge and a SiS963 South Bridge. It is remarkable, that there is an external frame-buffer for the graphics core, integrated in SiS755. In general, the specifications of the SiS solution are quite standard: AGP 8X, USB 2.0, IEEE1394, Serial ATA, etc.

Of course, the eigth generation of AMD processors wasn’t missed by NVIDIA, whose founder, Jen-Hsen Huang, by the way, started his career in AMD in the beginning of 1980-s. The company from Santa-Clara presented an reference mainboard, based on its CK8 chipset. According to the non-official information, CK8 has an integrated GeForce4 MX (NV17) graphics. However, a version without it is being shown at the moment (like nForce 415D). It is known, that Hammer processors have an integrated memory controller, therefore, if an integrated video-adapter uses the system memory as a frame-buffer, the performance of the videoboard will be low because of high latency. Moreover, the total speed of the system will decrease because the system memory bandwidth will be limited.

Maybe, the CK8 chipset has an embedded memory controller, which will give the integrated GPU a direct access to the system memory (DMA), maybe some effective caching facilities were installed to fasten the speed. It doesn’t make any sense to discuss this point, because there hasn’t been any official information on this account yet.

According to the non-official information, all the presented chipsets will be released during the period from the fourth quarter of 2002 till the first quarter of 2003.