by Anton Shilov
11/13/2002 | 08:37 PM
VIA Technologies this year has been very strong on the Socket A platform market, however, was much weaker on the Pentium 4 field. Unfortunately, the company not only has numerous problems with the law, selling their Quad Pumped Bus-supporting products, but also some hardware-related troubles with the actual chipsets. As an example, I can remind you the situation with the P4X333 and P4X400 “pseudo-different” North Bridges this summer, when it appeared that the latter was an improved version of the former and the Taipei-based company decided to forget about the junky one as fast as possible. On the other hand, VIA Technologies’ KT333 and KT400 for AMD processors appeared to be very popular both among the end-users and system integrators.
Well, the trend is to continue next year, so to speak. Sources from Taiwan report that VIA Technologies will only be able to start the mass-production of their dual-channel DDR SDRAM-supporting core-logic for the Pentium 4 processors in the very late December, not this month, as it was originally planned. What is very strange is that VIA has already demonstrated the novelty at numerous exhibitions and their officials alluded that there will be no delays with the newcomer.<%BANNER[article]%>
The P4X600 is intended for the Pentium 4 processors with 400 or 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus and features dual-channel memory controller. Keeping in mind VIA’s negative experience with DDR400, the company only declared PC2100 and PC2700 support for their new device. Dual-channel PC2700 DDR SDRAM delivers about 5.4GB/s of peak system bandwidth what should be enough not only for the current Pentium 4 processors with 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, but also for the up and coming Pentium 4 “Prescott” CPUs with 667MHz FSB. It is also very natural that VIA P4X600 supports AGP 8x and V-Link 8x, like all the latest core-logic products from the company.
At the moment both SiS and Intel are about to release the competing chipsets with same or better specifications. When VIA starts its volume-production of the product, they will already be late and the market of the powerful workstations will be fulfilled. Furthermore, the demand on computer components is very weak in the first quarter, hence, VIA will not be able to fight their share of the core-logic market back, or earn additional money selling the products then.
I wonder if VIA also postpones its famous P4X800 with DDR-II and QBM SDRAM memory support due to the delay with the P4X600. Frankly speaking, it is not very likely, because the P4X800 is intended for the next-generation Pentium 4 “Prescott” processors, hence the release of the core-logic is probably set on May or June.
On the Socket A front VIA was expected to launch VIA KT400A, an improved version of the KT400 chipset, this year (see this news-story), but something now stops the company from the product roll-out this December.
Basically, the only difference the novelty can offer us is boosted performance with the Athlon XP CPUs with 333MHz FSB compared to the predecessor. The strongest rival for the current KT400 core-logic is NVIDIA’s nForce2 that is not adopted widely due to the very high prices of the products. As a result, VIA does not really need to force the launch of the KT400A this year, since the competition is relatively weak and the crown of the Socket A market leader is not going to fall down from VIA’s head.