VIA Technologies, a developer of silicon-chip technologies and PC-platform solutions, today announced the VIA K8T890 chipset, enabling advanced PCI Express (PCIe) connectivity on motherboards for the latest AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron, and AMD Sempron processors. The VIA K8T890 chipset is designed to fully accommodate the increased multimedia demands being placed on the PC through applications such as high-definition video creation, multi-streaming audio and the latest 3D-game engines that require ever-increasing levels of system bandwidth. Featuring the unique VIA Flex Express architecture, the VIA K8T890 chipset provides support for the latest high performance PCI Express x16 graphics cards, benefiting from a blistering 4GB/s of bandwidth, both upstream and downstream.
The K8T890 chipset also supports up to four PCIe×1 connections, each offering 250MB/s bandwidth per direction to a wide range of high-bandwidth peripheral devices – approximately double the maximum theoretical bandwidth provided by existing PCI 2.2 peripheral connectivity. Among the peripheral devices most likely to benefit from the increased bandwidth will be Gigabit Ethernet connections and bandwidth-hungry HDTV tuner cards, which will be able to perform to their full potential without the constraints of limited bus bandwidth.