Via KT600

[NerdyDuffman]

Hexus had a preview of the new chipset from Via which from this article looks like it still lags behind the Nforce2 chipset. It still will not have Dual-Channel ram.

http://www.hexus.net/review.php?review=581

[Telexen]

And yet another failure from VIA.

This is why Pentium 4 technology is so much faster than AthlonXP...all we have for chipset manufacturers is VIA and nVidia...since AMD hasn't released anything new recently for Socket A...and VIA sucks...so all we really have for good solutions is nVidia....

Intel makes chipsets..SiS makes chipsets (though I really don't know why someone would want a SiS chipset, or brag about having one )

VIA is no longer in the P4 chipset business. All future VIA-based P4 chipset designs will be engineered and built by FIC. The KT-600 is the end of the road as far as VIA Technologies is concerned.

BTW, I'll brag about my SiS chipset, the 748FX. I've been using SiS Athlon chipsets since the 730. Memory bandwidth is not everything, as latency and other board aspects can impact overall performance. For example, SiS offers the highest performance southbridge IDE controller available for Athlon desktop configurations.

[Peter M]

Rob, you do know that FIC and VIA are under the same company roof, at the end of the day? It's all Formosa Plastics, y'know ...

Hexus have been comparing an unfinished board against a mass produced one. Other KT600 benches have been showing it much closer to NForce-2 - better demonstrating VIA's point of not doing dual channel RAM. They're very very close, without involving the extra cost of routing two RAM channels on the board, and without the extra effort and cost to the user of getting matched pairs of DIMMs.

[Peter M]

Yet still, I do second that SiS are doing a much better job currently. Higher integration south bridges (where's FireWire, VIA?) and a brilliantly fast inter chipset connection with tons of very well balanced I/O bandwidth. Initial benchmarks of 748 and 963(L) have shown a massive speed gain particularly in disk I/O heavy applications; and it'll get even better come 964.
RAM bandwidth isn't everything; and I/O and PCI bandwidth is something NForce has been somewhat poor so far. They're good at AGP and RAM (well duh, that's what they've been doing all the time before they made chipsets ) but everything else is still in the learning curve.

SiS in turn have pioneered in making IDE fast (moving the IDE channels into the north bridge back in the 486 days already!), and are now first in balancing the I/O ongoings to serve multimedia streams just as well as bursty mass storage and human interface data trickle.

[tony_j15]

VIA is no longer in the P4 chipset business. All future VIA-based P4 chipset designs will be engineered and built by FIC. The KT-600 is the end of the road as far as VIA Technologies is concerned.

You saying VIA is closing shop? A little proof please? I'd love to take your word for it, but IMO they are doing OK.

From the Pentium 4 perspective, essentially yes. As Peter has said (and most tech journalist know), it is hard to seperate VIA and FIC, but VIA will no longer package or design P4 chipsets under the VIA name after the KT600. Drop a search in the news section.

now first in balancing the I/O ongoings to serve multimedia streams

Thus my interest in SiS chipset architectures. The superb I/O performance for streaming data speeds my multimedia workstation with no need for additional IDE or SCSI controllers. Not to mention the low chipset acquisition cost for manufacturers, thus competitive motherboard pricing strategies.

Robert Richmond

[Peter M]

Rob, you got something mixed up there. KT600 is an Athlon chipset. And of course it's the last of that breed, since Athlon itself is nearing the end of its life cycle. Whether they slap a VIA, S3, FIC or whoever else's brand logo on (we all remember the "PC-Chips" alias chipsets, don't we?) doesn't make a difference at all. FIC does not have a chipset design team. Even if that story holds true, it's all no more than brand shuffling within a LARGE company.

[tony_j15]

Confused... I know they arent making them anymore for P4's, they shouldnt have gotten into that anyway. But they still will be making chipsets in the future for Athlon64's n stuff right?

[Peter M]

Making chipsets for Athlon-64 is all different, since the RAM controller is in the CPU already. Chipsets there are all about AGP, PCI and I/O - little areas left to do the performance leapfrogging we've seen up to now.
SiS with their I/O performance migh tbe leading the pack; NVidia's offering is interesting because it's a single chip; VIA might be first to have an Athlon-64 chipset with integrated graphics, they've apparently been sampling it for a while already.