VIA today joined Nvidia and AMD itself and launched a chipset designed to support the new Opteron 64-bit processor. VIA"s Apollo K8T400M is a two-chip product, that"s essentially a modified version of VIA"s KT400A, adding HyperTransport to the North Bridge to allow it to communicate with the CPU. The connection to the South Bridge, VIA"s regular VT8237, operates over the company"s established 1.06GBps V-Link bus.
The K8T400M North Bridge can connect to two Opterons, and provides an AGP 8x bus for graphics. The VT8237 provides dual-channel Serial ATA supporting RAID 0, 1 and 0+1; dual-channel ATA-133; support for up to eight USB 2.0 ports; VIA"s Vinyl six-channel surround sound audio system; 10/100Mbps Ethernet; PCI support; and an MC 97 modem.