Some news from Aces:
aceshardware.com
VIA's Winchip 4 and 5
aceshardware.com
40000 Thunderbirds compatible with VIA KX-133 (AMD)
Posted By johan
Monday, May 22, 2000 - 6:12:29 AM
While I am not very competent in reading the language of Go‰the (=German), I found some interesting tidbits in this c't article.
First of all, it appears that the Thunderbird works with a "push and Pull" signal and the K75 works with a "Open Drain" signal. Feel free to enlighten me about this signal stuff, but it seems to be the reason why the Thunderbird does not work together with VIA's KX133 which only supports "Open Drain". AMD will produce (only) 40.000 thunderbirds with "Open Drain" signaling, which will work happily together with VIA's KX-133 chipset, to make the motherboard manufacturers happy. AMD, we want some of those on the DIY market too ;).
C't also states that whether the rumours that certain boards with the KX-133 (Abit, ASUS) will nevertheless work with normal, "Push and Pull", Thunderbirds (thanks to a bios upgrade) remains to be seen, and will create a lot of confusion.
ALI, the other chipset company, will present a Socket A/Slot A chipset in june, and it is rumoured that this chipset will support DDR SDRAM!!
VIA seems to focus on the PIII market, and is readying a PRO266 chipset with support for 133 MHz DDR SDRAM (2.1 GB/s) for the PIII market. Ace's readers know that DDR SDRAM will not push the PIII's performance much higher, as the PIII's memory performance is crippled by the 133 MHZ GTL+ bus. As you can read here, 133 MHz SDRAM combined with the 200 Mhz EV6 bus delivers as much bandwidth as a 133 MHZ GTL+ FSB does with DDR SDRAM!
Feel free to correct my limited understanding of German ;). Thanks goes to KH, Armand and Willy.
Joe |
