Hattig asks:

1. In regards to PCI, are VIA actively supporting current and future PCI standards and looking into incorporating them into new chipsets for both high end and consumer level products? I am talking about 66MHz PCI, 64bit PCI and PCI-X.

VIA: We are a strong supporter of PCI, and are working very closely with our partners in the industry to migrate our chipsets to the PCI-64 and PCI-X standard. This will first be implemented on our server chipsets, and then as the costs go down will be integrated into standard desktops and notebooks.

2. What other connection technologies are you looking at incorporating within your chipsets in the future? Will Firewire ever become a core part of the south bridge, like USB (and presumably USB2 soon)?

VIA: We already offer a cost effective discrete 1394 controller and are considering whether to integrate this into a future south bridge. As for USB 2.0, are looking at developing both discrete PCI-USB 2.0 controllers and integrating this feature into our chipsets.

grey rain asks: It is rumored that VIA is making a Pentium 4 chipset. Will this rumored chipset support the current "Willamette"/Socket 423 P4, or will it be "Northwood"/Socket 478 P4?

VIA:, We are looking at a number of potential approaches to P4 chipsets, including both discrete as well as SMA solutions. Our goal is to make these products pin-to-pin compatible with each other and provide support for single and dual processors.

Arcadian asks:

1. I was wondering if VIA has any plans to design chipsets that support any of Intel's IA-64 line of microprocessors. If so, what would be the design goals of such a project? In other words, would VIA opt for heavy memory bandwidth and capacity, large I/O bandwidth and PCI-X support, or a combination of the two?

VIA: VIA's focus is on the volume chipset market, so we are concentrating our resources on supporting 32-bit processors for the moment. However, we will definitely consider developing products that support the IA-64 or any other x86 64-bit CPU architecture when those processors reach the mainstream PC market place in the future.

2. Would VIA use their V-Link technology as a communications protocol, or would VIA go for a different standard?

VIA: V-Link is a highly scalable communications protocol with ample room for increasing bandwidth, so we intend to implement this in our future chipset designs. At this time, we are also evaluating AMD's LDT (HyperTransport) technology for highly integrated product to support AMD's next generation processor.