With the i820 chipset, Intel moved to a hub architecture to connect the northbridge and southbridge, moving PCI from the northbridge to the southbridge in the process. This allowed Intel to, among other things, speed up the interface between north and southbridges to improve I/O and multimedia performance.

VIA is now following in Intel's path with their own chipset hub architecture, named V-Link. V-Link uses a 66MHz, 8-bit, quad-pumped interface to deliver 266MBps of peak bandwidth. The interface is also more efficient than PCI, which should mean the real world bandwidth of V-Link should more than double the real world bandwidth of 33MHz, 32-bit PCI.

Yet another advantage of V-Link is that, with only an 8-bit interface, it uses far fewer pins than the 32-bit PCI bus. Having fewer pins allows smaller packaging or more features, either lowering the cost or enlarging the feature set. As for LDT, AMD's answer for the north/southbridge connection and more, VIA went with V-Link since LDT did not meet their cost or schedule needs. With the support AMD is putting behind LDT, we expect VIA will eventually use LDT in their AMD target chipsets.

At long last, VIA has shipped their PM133 and KM133 chipsets, integrating S3 Savage4 video in a Shared Memory Architecture (SMA). SMA systems share system memory with video memory. These chipsets combine PC133 memory with 3D power that should easily outrun Intel's integrated video. We expect VIA to continue to release integrated video chipsets several months after the standalone versions ship. Later in 2001, VIA should ship the DDR versions of these chipsets. These should increase video performance dramatically due to the added bandwidth of DDR memory. Looking even further, you can expect to see Savage 2000 video integrated into the chipset. This likely will not happen until after VIA moves to a .15-micron process.

VIA will be releasing at least two chipsets for mobile applications with integrated Twister video, the PN133 and KN133. Twister is an SMA video architecture based on S3 video technology. SMA makes great sense in mobile systems, since it eliminates the need for a separate video chip and separate memory for that video chip. This reduces power usage, extends battery life, and reduces system costs. There is a penalty in performance though since memory bandwidth is shared.

We expect VIA to run into some healthy competition from ALi on the mobile front. ALi recently announced their Cyber series SMA mobile chipset, and later even displayed a running early version of it at Platform Conference. The Cyber series will use DDR memory instead of SDR memory, and will likely outrun VIA in 3D and general performance. DDR also has a power advantage over SDR memory (at the Platform Conference we saw evidence of this to be as much as 30% less for DDR). We don't expect to see DDR mobile chipsets from VIA until late 2001 or even into 2002, and with ALi planning on shipping mid-year, VIA will likely be weak in the mobile market.