New VIA mainboards might be needed for dual-core
New VIA mainboards might be needed for AMD dual-core
VIA are showing off the dual-core Athlon X2 on their stand, running with the company's K8T890 Pro core logic on a reference board. When I covered X2 on its launch, I mentioned that should a board be able to run an Athlon FX processor, be that FX-53 or FX-55 (the only Socket 939 Athlon FX processors), it's able to run a dual-core processor from an electrical and power standpoint. That leaves only the supporting BIOS revision for that board in order to give it dual-core compatibility.
However, talking to VIA yesterday confirmed that even though its board partners have mainboards out there that run an FX just fine, that board revisions may be brought out to properly support Athlon X2 from an electrical standpoint. Whether that's the case for other board vendors, with boards not using VIA core logic, I'm not sure. Expect to see those VIA board partners that need a mainboard revision to support the X2, do so with paired marketing to promote that fact.
