Via pushes ahead with Pentium 4 plans

Although the standards committees still don't seem to have agreed on what DDR 400 should be, there seems little doubt to us that it will become a standard.

Nvidia, for example, has already said its Nforce 620 will support DDR400.

Boards using the P4X333 have, we believe, started trickling into the market, with support for AGP 2X, 4X and 8X.

This chipset also uses 8X V-Link, that should be twice as fast as the previous version of V-Link, but it's the next Pentium 4 chipset which we first talked about at the INQUIRER last year which looks really interesting.

The P4X600 chipset will support new 400 MHZ FSB Pentium 4s as well as 533MHz Pentium 4s - released today.

Apart from AGP 8 X support and V link 8X or 533 MB/s if you prefer, there is a nice memory feature called 128 bit DDR 266/333 ECC support.

This means that Via will start using dual channel memory architecture, which is a feature Nvidia is already using with its Nforce.

It doesn't mean you can expect twice as much bandwidth than a 64-bit memory interface, but will give some clear advantage in performance.

Samples of this chipset should be sent out to manufacturers this month, while mass production is expected in June.

Again, as revealed here before, Via will introduce the P4X800, but this chipset will use DDR III.

If you are interested in SMA Northbridges, Via is working on after P4M266 and its pin compatible sister P4M266A is P4M333. The P4M333 is P4X333 with integrated Zoetrope GFX graphics inside. µ