CeBIT 2002 Part 2 - CPUs, Cooling, Motherboards, & Video

VIA

VIA had a few exciting things to show at CeBIT. They presented a notebook version of their C3 chip, which has an average power usage of only 6 watts. It runs at 1.35 volts; like Intel's Mobile P3 processors it comes in a micro FCPGA package. The maximum clock speed is 933MHz; the CPU is equiped with 128K L1 and 64K L2 cache. The C3's performance isn't that great, but for notebook users long battery life often matters more than high performance.

They also presented their new Pentium 4 chipset, the P4X333. Its new north bridge VT8754 supports up to 32 GB (!) of DDR333-SDRAM (PC2700). The VT8235 south bridge features six USB 2.0 ports, as well as Utra ATA/133 IDE.

A working prototype of a board using this chip was displayed to the public at the VIA booth.

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This board was displayed to the public, running a 3D demo. Apparently, the P4X333 north bridge runs really cool - on the demo system, it ran stable sans North Bridge heatsink.

Motherboard manufactureres are a little reluctant towards offering VIA-based P4 boards. This is because they fear legal pressure from Intel, since VIA doesn't own a license for the P4 bus protocol. VIA has found a solution to this problem: They sell motherboards under the "VIA mainboard" brand from VIA's Platform Solutions Devision (VPSD), without disclosing the real manufacturer. Here's a shot of one of these "VIA boards", using the P4X333:

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