VIA has begun shipping its Apollo KT600 chipset for 400MHz frontside bus Athlon XP processors, and has signed 20-odd mobo makers to use the product.
The KT600 north bridge chip provides AGP 4x/8x, 266-400MHz FSB support and incorporates VIA's FastStream64 400MHz DDR SDRAM controller which, according to VIA, "uses an expanded array of prefetch buffers to reduce latency in the memory controller, extending performance at a lower transistor cost than dual channel implementations". The chip can cope with up to 4GB of DDR memory. The chipset includes the VT8237 south bridge, which provides Serial ATA with RAID support (offering RAID 0, 1 and 0+1), parallel ATA (up to four devices), VIA's Vinyl six-channel audio sub-system and the eight-channel Gold version, plus support for up to eight USB 2.0 ports, 56Kbps modem and 10/100Mbps Ethernet. Both chips connect across VIA's 8x V-Link 533MBps bus.
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News source: The Reg
