Via roadmaps show Athlon 64 PCI-Express advance

CPU ROADMAPS seen by the INQUIRER earlier this week show some big changes ahead on a number of fronts.

One of the most important is that a future Athlon64 chipset will support PCI-Express, which is slated to appear in machines next year and which we believe will change a lot of the rules for PC design, particularly as Microsoft is expected to support PCI Express with Longhorn.

This article will deal with the changes to the AMD roadmap but there are also some big changes ahead to Pentium 4 support too, as you'd expect.

Via is already sampling the Athlon XP KT 600 chipset and that's expected to be in production this quarter as well, supporting 400MHz front side buses. The same is true for the integrated KM400A AMD chipset, but this will also include integrated UniChrome GFX graphics capabilities and an integrated video processor. The latter is expected to ship in quantity during Q3 this year.

Via is still on track to support the Athlon64 with the K8T400M and the K8M400, each of which has a Athlon 64 HT bridge, and support 4X/8X AGP. The latter includes an eight to 64MB UMA frame buffer, has two pixel pipes and two texture units, an external DVI/TV out interface, and integrated Unichrome 2GFX.

But in the fourth quarter of this year Via will start sampling a new chipset for the Athlon 64. The K8 PCIE, as its name implies will support 16+4 PCI-Express, together with an Ultra V-Link.

On the south bridge chip support side, Via will sample the VT 8239 in Q3 of this year. This gives a total of eight hard drive options - two integrated IDE interfaces for four ATA-133 drives, and an integrated S-ATA port for four Serial ATA drives.

This chip will support eight ports of USB 2.0, with direct communication on port 0, UAA/Azalia advanced audio, Raid 0, 1, and 0+1 support, 96K/20-bit six channel audio, 10/100 BT with external PHY and integrated IO. µ