The chipsets

Chipset update

Like the copper versus aluminum "debate," the KT133 and KX133 chipsets should offer similar levels of performance. Later this year VIA plans to add integrated Savage4 graphics on the North Bridge of the chipset, with the 686A South Bridge expected to be updated with ATA-100 compliance.

While VIA occupies the low-end space with their Athlon chipsets, AMD plans to supply the performance segment with their 760 chipset.

AMD's 760 chipset

One principal improvement 760 will add over current Athlon chipsets will be a faster 266MHz system bus. The clock speed of the bus will actually be 133MHz with memory reads and writes occurring on the rising and falling edges of each clock cycle yielding an effective speed of 266MHz.

Another principal addition will be support for double data rate (DDR) SDRAM. In particular, PC2100 (266MHz) and PC1600 (200MHz) modules will be supported by the 760 chipset.

Like the hub architecture of the Intel 820/840 chipset, the 760 chipset will shift the PCI bus from the critical link connecting the North and South Bridge of the 760 chipset to a peripheral interface on the South Bridge of the chipset. This should result in increased system performance.

For the server/workstation market, AMD plans to release a multiprocessor variant of the 760 chipset, named 760MP. AMD already demonstrated their DDR Athlon system at WinHEC last April. Both the 760 and 760MP chipsets are scheduled to be released during the second half of 2000.

Additional future products

What else lies on the horizon for the Athlon platform? According to AMD, ALi is also working on a performance chipset with a 266MHz system bus and DDR memory support. We're unsure of the name of this product and its release date, but we'll be sure to keep an eye out for it. SiS is also mentioned in AMD documents to be working on a value chipset for the Athlon. These are all Socket A products, Slot A will slowly fade into the sunset over the course of the 2000 calendar year.

On the CPU side of things, Duron will be launched later this month exclusively in Socket A packaging at speeds up to 700MHz. Intended to replace the K6-x series of processors, Duron will be based on the same basic architecture of Thunderbird, minus 192K of L2 cache. (Giving it a total of 64K) By the end of this year AMD plans to release their mobile Socket A variant of Athlon (codenamed "Corvette") as well as "Mustang," AMD's Socket A processor with a "large on-chip cache" for the workstation/server market.