A murmur went through the world, as with nVidia GeForce 6800 PCI Express SLI technology brought back from oblivion. However with a hook: suitable motherboards are scarce and extremely expensive. VIA this would now change.

Of the dilemma solution the name VIA PT894 and VIA PT894 Pro and is to come for Intel’s Pentium 4 processors. On the feature list, including support for DDR2 memory at 400 and 667 MHz dual-channel mode is available. Still, the PT894 supports already Intel’s new frontside bus 1066 MHz, which will celebrate its premiere in the near future with the new extreme Edition of the Pentium 4 s. Additional support for AGP 8 x will have, however, merely the PT890.

The only difference between the PT894 and the PT894 Pro is meanwhile in support of two PCI-Express-x 16 slots required for NVIDIA SLI technology. Here Intel so is VIA the main competitor one step ahead, finally provides the processor and chip giant something like this only with the E7525 chipset (Tumwater), which – the name suggests it already – is intended only for small servers and workstations and requires corresponding processors. Nothing here happens without a Xeon CPU so that the end user, must resort to, enjoy NVIDIA SLI technology with an Intel chipset probably very deep in the Pocket. Via solution that has been explicitly designed for desktop systems, should be, however, much cheaper and work with any commercially available Pentium-4 and Celeron processor.

Also AMD’s Athlon 64 processor plans VIA an appropriate chipset. This is called K8T890 (Pro), and is to appear for the Socket 939 and accordingly a HyperTransport 1000 MHz have – as well as already mentioned in the Pro version of the two PCI-Express-x 16 slots. Here you can get but from nVidias nForce 4 competition, while one quite alone Furthermore precedes on Intel systems. Both VIA PT894 and PT890 and K8T890 will run in September in samples of the band, while the end of the mass production should start.