ITotals: October`2002
Mainboards
Contrary to the processor market, there was a storm of mainboards due to three new Intel chipsets announced at the beginning of October - i845PE, i845GE, i845GV. Plus, the improved i850E which now supports PC1066 RDRAM. The mobo makers felt really enthusiastic about it, they started announcing the respective products a couple of weeks before. And during the month every company launched a new solution which are already available on the shelves.
ABIT IT7-MAX2 v2.0
The debut of the new chipsets, though only from Intel, was a very contributory step. First of all, it helped cut down prices of the previous generation - i845E/G/GL. Secondly, the demand for the i845PE turned out to be underestimated and the prices started creeping up. But this situation must be resolved on December 29 when the prices
for the whole line are to be brought down. The first dual-channel Intel's chipset supporting DDR SDRAM, i7205 (Granite Bay), is expected earlier on the market. The name is peculiar to the Intel's chipsets designed for the workstation sphere, but I have no doubts it will be integrated into boards of High-End PCs. And it won't be too long until the ICH5 (Serial ATA, 8 USB 2 ports) and a user version of the Granite Bay - Springdale, expected in April.
DFI NB80-EA (Granite Bay)
By the way, you don't need to wait for dual-channel chipsets supporting DDR. Certainly, I mean the SiS 655 (not nForce or nForce2) the motherboards on which started glutting the market at the end of October. Two PC2700 channels, AGP 8X, Serial ATA, possible Gigabit Ethernet controller from Broadcom, - all this can be found in stores already in November.
ASUS P4SDX (SiS 655)
Let's add a less readical chipset SiS 648 the boards on which keep on arriving with more interesting ideas, and their number is so great that it seems to be shortage of this chipset. But it's not new for SiS because the company has been suffering the lack of production facilities since it started making successful solutions. Another problem is the litigation with UMC finished not so long ago: out of 29 charge points SiS was found guilty only by one, but it was enough for the US Trade Commission to ban
sales of certain SiS's chipsets on the American market. However, production of almost all such chipsets is phased out already, and SiS doesn't suffer much.
VIA is in the completely same situation: all its positions depend only on the KT400; such mainboards keep on flooding the market and they've got the support of Athlon and FSB333. The KT400 is so popular that VIA had to achnowledge its shortage, though it never had problems with production facilities. Note that the today's High-End boards on the KT400 do not differ from High-End boards on the Pentium 4 - they both feature AGP 8X, SerialATA, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, etc. (And it seems that the Wi-Fi support will soon become standard for the High-End market).
MSI KT4V
However, VIA should develop something new, and in November it's expected to announce the P4X600 (dual-channel DDR for Pentium 4), and two integrated chipsets - P4M266A and P4M400. The KT400A is also arriving soon; it differs from its predecessor in a more rapid memory controller.
But while VIA is hesitating NVIDIA keeps on attacking - at the end of October the Japanese retail market accepted nForce2 based mainboards from Leadtek announced a couple of weeks before. The price of $113 is really pleasing - the second version of the NVIDIA's chipset comes at a really competitive price. The company has already claimed that it covers 35% of the market of OEM boards for Athlon, and with the triumphal entry of the nForce2 this figure will be quite believable.
Finally, the news from Germany - the circuit court of Dusseldorf banned the import of the VIA's chipsets for Pentium 4 into Germany, by the suit from Intel. It also concerns mainboards on these chipsets. They will surely start appealing now against the decision and it's far not clear yet that such decision will be made in other countries, but it would be disappointing if the Intel's quite fair claimes made VIA stop its production of chipsets for Pentium 4.
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