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The Forum: Stale Atmosphere
The presentation was a little bit of a disappointment, since it lacked effective demonstrations, as done by Intel to make the whole affair vivid and even a bit exciting. The more so as most participants were adequately familiar with the technological details and genuine innovations were not presented.
It would have been really interesting to see a working sample or at least get some rough numbers of the performance of this new technology.
VIA is reaching for a high goal. Previous chipsets have not been able to beat Intel products that were based on the same technology. However, this time VIA will introduce a new memory generation that has no official support from Intel so far. Unless Intel is finally ending the unholy marriage with Rambus to give the first positive sign of this year, VIA and DDR SDRAM will be up against Intel and RDRAM.
Chipsets With DDR Support: VT8633 and KT266
According to the name of the current Athlon chipset (KT133) the new model with DDR support is called KT266. It supports both the AMD Duron and Athlon (Thunderbird). VIA also offers a chipset for Celeron or Pentium III systems, the VIA Apollo Pro 266 (VT8633). Intel is not supposed to release a chipset with support for DDR memory (codename Almador) until mid 2001.