VIA Teams Up Pentium 4 With DDR-Memory

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Pentium 4 Chipsets

So far only one platform has been available for Pentium 4, Intel's 850 RDRAM chipset. Now VIA is starting to ship its P4X266 and in a few weeks Intel will release the first 'step' of the i845 chipset. We made a little comparison table to give you an overlook of the different features.

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Chipset	VIA P4X266	Intel 845	Intel 850
Launch	August 2001	September 2001	November 2000
CPU-Platform	Sockel 423/478	Sockel 423/478	Sockel 423/478
Supported Processors	Intel Pentium 4	Intel Pentium 4	Intel Pentium 4
SMP-Support	No	No	Yes
Chipset Northbridge	VIA VT8753	Intel 82845	Intel 82850
Chipset Southbridge	VIA VT8233	Intel 82801 BA	Intel 82801 BA
Front Side Bus Clock	100 MHz (quad pumped)	100 MHz (quad pumped)	100 MHz (quad pumped)
Memory Clock	100/133 MHz SDR/DDR	100/133 MHz SDR/DDR	400 MHz
asynchronuous Memory Clock	Yes	No	No
FSB-Overclocking*	up to 200 MHz	up to 180 MHz	up to 133 MHz
max. number of memory-Slots	4	4	4
max. amount of Memory	4096 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB
SDRAM Support	Yes	Yes	No
DDR-SDRAM Support	Yes	Yes, but not supported until Q1/2002	No
VC-SDRAM Support	Yes	No	No
RDRAM Support	No	No	Yes
Dual Channel RDRAM Support	No	No	Yes
Max. Memory Bandwidth	2133 MB/s	1066 MB/s for the time being	3200 MB/s
Ultra-ATA/33/66/100	Yes/Yes/Yes	Yes/Yes/Yes	Yes/Yes/Yes
Number of USB Ports	6	6	4
USB 2.0	No	Yes	No
max. number of PCI-Slots	5	6	6
integrated Graphics	No	No	No
AGP 1x / 2x / 4x	Yes / Yes / Yes	Yes / Yes / Yes	Yes / Yes / Yes
ACPI-Features	Yes	Yes	Yes

* depending on clock generator chip

We know that i850 is an RDRAM-only solution, which makes it expensive. Its dual-channel Rambus architecture however allows a memory bandwidth of up to 3200 MB/s, which is identical to Pentium 4's processor bus bandwidth.