Via roadmaps show Athlon 64 PCI-Express advance

CPU ROADMAPS seen by the INQUIRER earlier this week show some big changes ahead on a number of fronts. One of the most important is that a future Athlon64 chipset will support PCI-Express, which is slated to appear in machines next year and which we believe will change a lot of the rules for PC design, particularly as Microsoft is expected to support PCI Express with Longhorn.

This article will deal with the changes to the AMD roadmap but there are also some big changes ahead to Pentium 4 support too, as you'd expect. Via is already sampling the Athlon XP KT 600 chipset and that's expected to be in production this quarter as well, supporting 400MHz front side buses. The same is true for the integrated KM400A AMD chipset, but this will also include integrated UniChrome GFX graphics capabilities and an integrated video processor. The latter is expected to ship in quantity during Q3 this year.

Via is already sampling the Athlon XP KT 600 chipset and that's expected to be in production this quarter as well, supporting 400MHz front side buses. The same is true for the integrated KM400A AMD chipset, but this will also include integrated UniChrome GFX graphics capabilities and an integrated video processor. The latter is expected to ship in quantity during Q3 this year.

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