Posted on Wednesday, February 14 2007 @ 2:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
DailyTech has
details about the upcoming VIA PT960 chipset for the Intel platform. This chip is designed for the Core 2 architecture and supports FSBs of up to 1333MHz.
The VIA PT960 will be a discrete north bridge and rely on PCIe graphics cards. VIA's PT960 will be compliant with the PCIe 2.0 specification. There will be support for one PCIe 2.0 x16 and four PCIe 2.0 x1 slots. VIA’ PT960 only has a single-channel memory controller. This is strange as Intel offers dual-channel memory support across its entire Broadwater 96x chipset-lineup, however, it is in line with VIA’s previous chipset offerings such as the PT890. Nevertheless, the memory controller supports DDR2-1066 and DDR3-1333 MHz memory. Intel is already sampling its DDR3-supporting motherboards to partners.
VIA has kicked the previous P4M naming scheme out the door in favor of simply PM with the PM960, which sports a revised graphics core as well. The new integrated graphics core is dubbed S3 Chrome 9 HD and upgrades the video processing engine of the P4M900. New video processing features include hardware decoding acceleration for MPEG4, WMV9, VC1 and H.264 video formats. This makes the integrated S3 Chrome 9 HD graphics core ideal for high-definition video playback.
