Well, the newsmakers seem to be unable to leave alone the upcoming VIA KT333 chipset. Now and then there is something new cropping up, which either denies the previous facts or confirms them, giving a lot of food for thought. I believe that it’s high time we finished the KT333 chipset once and for all before February 20 :)

To begin with I have to say that the facts reported here seem to be absolutely true. At least there are no new facts proving the opposite. And now let’s try to follow the KT333 moving into the market step by step.

• On February 20 VIA will announce KT333 chipset supporting the new PC2700 DDR SDRAM, featuring old 266MB/sec V-Link bus, no AGP 8x support and VT8233A South Bridge (in other words, it will be an ordinary pseudo-new chipset, as we called this kind of solutions last year). The KT333 North Bridge revision will be "CD". The Inquirer claims that VIA has already shipped over 10,000 KT333 CD Rev. chips. It is exactly the revision all first mainboards, which have already started selling (see this news story) are built on. The mainboard manufacturers are free to provide their products with optional VT6202 chip supporting USB 2.0. actually, 10,000 is a negligibly small amount for VIA. I believe that The Inquirer guys might have missed out one zero in the end of this number. This way it could look more credible :)
• Later we will see KT333 CE revision, which will support AGP 8x and 533MB/sec V-Link. CE will be fully pin-to-pin compatible with CD revision. Until a new VT8235 South Bridge comes out, KT333 North Bridge will be provided with the old VT8233A South Bridge, which means that V-Link bandwidth will be only 266MB/sec.
• Some time in April-May VT8235 South Bridge is expected to come out (it will support V-Link 533MB/sec and USB 2.0) and only then the KT333 core logic will become a "completely new" Socket A solution with PC2700 DDR SDRAM support (KT333 North Bridge), AGP 8x (KT333 rev. CE), 533MB/sec V-Link (between KT333 rev. CE and VT8235) and USB 2.0 (VT8235).

And in conclusion I would like to say a few words about the expected performance of KT333. As I understand, the performance difference between the KT333 with PC2100 and KT333 with PC2700 memory will be very small, because the extra bandwidth of the new memory type will not be demanded (Athlon – 2128MB/sec, PC2100 – 2100MB/sec, PC2700 – 2700MB/sec). It is surely not a Pentium 4 with its 3.2GB/sec Quad Pumped Bus. :)

As for the performance with PC2100 DDR SDRAM, I assume that VIA once again enhanced the memory controller, so that this combination of chipset and memory will be faster than KT266A with PC2100 DDR SDRAM.