VIA Technologies, a developer of core logic chipsets, microprocessors, multimedia and communications chipsets, has announced its new VT8233A South Bridge chip.
Developed in partnership with hard drive vendor, Maxtor Corporation, it is claimed to be the industry`s first Ultra ATA/133 South Bridge chipset. The VT8233A delivers higher data transfer rates, of up to 133MB per second, between the chipset and Maxtor Fast Drives.
The new chip also enables the use of 48-bit addresses developed under Maxtor`s Big Drive initiative, which breaks the current 137GB barrier to allow the creation of much larger ATA hard drives with capacities of up to 144 peta bytes (PB).
"VIA has worked very closely with Maxtor to integrate the Fast Drive interface and Big Drive capacity into our VT8233A South Bridge," says Tim Handley, marketing manager of VIA Technologies in SA.
"Larger capacities and faster access to data storage are essential for enhancing the user experience particularly when running today`s increasingly data intensive applications, such as digital audio, video and gaming."
The VT8233A is the latest addition to the V-MAP (VIA Modular Architecture Platform) family of chipsets, which guarantees pin compatibility across a wide range of VIA DDR chipsets. V-MAP allows motherboard manufacturers, OEMs, and system integrators to serve different market segments on a single, unified platform design.
The VT8233A is pin compatible with the current VT8233/VT8233C South Bridges, and can be connected through the chipset`s high bandwidth V-Link Architecture to a wide choice of North Bridge chips supporting a complete range of processor platforms. These include the VIA Apollo P4X266 for the Intel Pentium 4 processor, the VIA Apollo KT266A and VIA Apollo KT266 for the AMD Athlon processor, and the VIA Apollo Pro266T and VIA Apollo Pro266 for the Intel Pentium III, Intel Celeron, and VIA C3 processors.
In addition to support for Maxtor`s Ultra ATA/133 Fast Drive and Big Drive technology, other key features in the VT8233A include six channel advanced AC`97 audio, four USB ports, LPC bus, MC-97 modem, and support for AMD`s second generation PowerNow! technology as well as Intel`s SpeedStep.
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