The whole market seems to be struck by a huge disillusionment, because we are still waiting both for DDR motherboards and memory to become widely available. Many people are starting to call the introduction of Double Data Rate memory a failure.

This kind of phenomenon is not new at all. Whenever a new technology is introduced, it is susceptible to failures and criticism. DDR-memory is seen as the proper companion to AMD's latest Athlon-processor with 133 (266) MHz processor bus clock ('C'-types), which was officially announced in combination with the still unavailable AMD760 DDR-chipset two months ago. However, the recent article 'The Three Musketeers ' already showed that the 133 (266) MHz FSB Athlons are able to outperform their 100 (200) MHz FSB ('B'-type) counterparts even with normal PC133 SDRAM already.

Instead of prematurely reporting on those DDR-motherboards that nobody is able to buy, we chose to introduce six new motherboards with VIA's latest Athlon chipset, the Apollo KT133A . The only difference to its predecessor Apollo KT133 is the added support for the above mentioned 133 (266) MHz processor bus clock used by the new 'C'-type Athlons. This beefed up Athlon-chipset from VIA might not offer support of DDR-memory, but it resembles mature technology, and provides reliability as well as good performance.