Fullon3D.Com has posted a preview of VIA´s Apollo Pro 266, Pentium III DDR chipset.

So what's new in the Apollo Pro 266? This is one of the first chipsets to offer DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM support for Intel's Pentium III platform. The chipset supports PC2100 DDR, that is, the memory frequency is set at 133MHz so the theoretical bandwidth is 133MHz *8 bytes*2=2.1GB/s. VIA opted to work on their Pentium III DDR chipset before the Athlon DDR chipset, where the market is currently pretty crowded with AMD's 761 and ALi's MAGiK 1 chipset. ALi also has their Alladin Pro 5 planned, which is a competing Pentium III DDR chipset.

The Apollo Pro 266 supports asynchronous memory operation so that even a 100Mhz front side bus processor can take advantage of PC2100 memory. The chipset consists of the VT8633 north bridge and the VT8233 south bridge. With the Apollo Pro 266, VIA has taken the first step in offering a high speed Vlink between the north and south bridge.

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