Comdex 2002 - Day 1: Working Springdale & Hammer Samples

VIA's KT400A - Dual Channel DDR?

Because of increasing pressure from NVIDIA on the Athlon XP chipset side, VIA will be going ahead with the KT400A as planned. The chipset is scheduled to be released early next year, possibly in the January - February time frame.

We caught a glimpse of a KT400A sample at FIC's booth:

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What was most interesting were the specs attached to the board:

If the KT400A is indeed a dual channel DDR solution then it will be a good indication that VIA is worried about the nForce2, since VIA has previously been an advocate of sticking with single channel DDR on the Athlon XP platform. We're still waiting for confirmation on the accuracy of this sticker as it could just be a misprint, but considering the accuracy of everything else we saw at the FIC suite we're lead to believe that it just may be true.

A dual channel DDR solution for the Athlon XP would only make sense if VIA were able to implement pre-fetching technology similar to that of NVIDIA's nForce2. Even then, remember that the majority of the performance boost the nForce2 saw was in only a small number of applications. It wouldn't be too hard for VIA to implement a dual channel DDR memory controller on the KT400A since a design is already complete for the P4X600.