VIA his chipsets plans for 2004

VIA has quite a few new chipsets planned in the first half of 2004 for both the Intel and AMD platform:

The answer to Intel his Grantsdale-P and Alderwood is going to be the PT890 which supports 400/533 and 800MHz FSB, Dual-Channel DDR and DDRII 400MHz to 667MHz with or without ECC support. Also PCI Express, and Ultra V-Link to connect with the VIA VT8237 or VT8239 southbridge. Sampling is expected in January 2004.

The PM890 will need to battle with Intel his Grantsdale-G which has Intel Extreme Graphics 3. The PM890 has an integrated UniChrome 3 graphical solution with DirectX9 capabilities. This chipset has no ECC support. It is also expected in Q1 2004.

For the AMD64 computers VIA is planning to offer its K8T890 providing 1GHz HyperTransport bus, PEG x16 graphics and Ultra V-Link to attach VT8237 or VT8239 I/O controller. The K8M890 will provide the same capabilities in addition to UniChrome 3 graphics core with DirectX 9.0 support. The K8M890 will only support VIA VT8239 though, as the report claims.

Apparently, VIA’s KT880 chipset – VIA’s first and only core-logic for AMD Athlon XP chips with dual-channel memory controller – is slated for production only in the first quarter of the year, therefore, do not expect products on KT880 to emerge too soon.

VIA VT8239 I/O controller – pin-to-pin compatible with its VT8237 predecessor – is expected to work with Taipei Taiwan-based firm’s core-logic products in the first half of 2004. The part will sport 2-channel Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133, 4 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID support, up to 8 USB 2.0 ports, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, up to 7 PCI slots, Azalia 6-channel audio and other I/O features. The VT8239 will connect to North Bridges using Ultra V-Link bus.

VIA’s product portfolio seems to offer enough high-end product for the Q2 introduction to support LGA775 as well as Socket 939 processors from Intel and AMD. VIA may lack some features its rivals promise to support, such as Wi-Fi software access point brought by Intel’s ICH6W, or dual-monitor capability by Grantsdale-G, though, given VIA’s aggressive pricing policy, the company may still see some success next year.

Source: X-bit Labs