VIA Chipsets
Market diversity seems to be VIA's aim in 2004, covering all bases. Here's their Q1 product lineup as far as enthusiast-class products go.Intel Pentium 4 Chipsets
PT890Following on from their dual-channel P4 chipset, PT880, VIA's Q1 (early Q2 most likely, but it could be close) chipset plans for Pentium 4 run to PT890. It basically mirrors what Intel are releasing with i925X. PT890 is a dual-channel chipset supporting Prescott and Northwood processors (including Extreme Editions), DDR and DDR-II memory and PCI Express.
Where i925X (including ICH6) seems to only implement a 16x lane for graphics and a 1x lane for peripherals, VIA will implement 16x for graphics in the PT890 bridge but also push their board partners to use VT8251 which carries two 1x peripheral lanes. More on the southbridge later.
That's it for P4, Prescott, DDR-II and PCI Express all get the nod and it's what's been expected.
AMD Athlon 64/Opteron Chipsets
K8T800 ProK8T800 Pro is the update we've been waiting for in Q1. VIA only mention an increase in HT clock frequency to 1GHz, for 2000MT's per second, but it's the locking of AGP and PCI across the board that will interest most enthusiasts.
K8T890 is K8T800 Pro with support for PCI Express 16x for graphics. It'll sample in Q1, but won't ship till Q2, so more on that in a future article. K8T800 Pro is almost guaranteed to be the Athlon 64 chipset of choice across all sockets in Q1, after its release, given the warm reception of K8T800 so far.
AMD Athlon XP Chipsets
KT890KT890 is sampling now, ready for release shortly. It brings VIA's northbridge offering for Socket A into line with what NVIDIA have been offering for ages now, dual-channel DDR400 support and support for all Athlon XP chips, even 200MHz front side bus versions.
It's southbridge pairings and potential performance that'll make KT890 boards appealing, but it'll be hard to get mindshare from nForce2 Ultra 400 boards, regardless.
Southbridge chips
VT8251VT8237CE, in mass production now, is the bridge we're used to seeing on all current VIA based motherboards, for all CPUs and socket types.
VT8251 is the new replacement, a V-MAP drop-in replacement for VT8237. Supporting 8 HDD devices (4 SATA, 4 ATA133), 8 USB 2.0 ports and PCI Express (a pair of 1x lanes), it also gets a Gigabit Ethernet MAC and PHY interface and a high performance 8-channel audio engine with 192kHz sample rate and 24-bit resolution.
Quite the piece of silicon, it's this chip, along with bridges like K8T800 Pro and KT890 that will drive their AMD efforts in Q1.
Summary
It's the VT8251 that will make VIA's Q1 northbridge designs extra appealing in new motherboards that are about to show up. VIA-based boards get excellent audio, PCI Express and Gigabit Ethernet in one fell swoop, complimenting the northbridge chosen for CPU, AGP and memory duties.While I don't expect their Intel offerings to grab much mindshare in Q1, Prescott support means they'll have a competitive part at least. It's potential Athlon 64 offerings that'll be the highlight of VIA's Q1. I'm keen to sample a KT890 board with VT8521 too, it could give Socket A a fresh lease of life.
VIA will have a strong Q1 2004, to carry on good work at the end of 2003.
