X-bit labs has also a VIA Apollo Pro266 chipset review.
Last year turned utterly fruitful for VIA. The company contrived to occupy good 50% of the market, since Intel pursued an inadequate policy in the chipset sector and there was hardly any rivalry on the part of other Taiwanese core logic manufacturers. However, VIA is bound to face strong competition this year and it will have to care a lot about its leadership, which promises to be a hard task to fulfill. First, as far as chipsets for Intel processors supporting SDR SDRAM are concerned, Intel got a fair chance to rock VIA´s positions after it launched its i815EP in late 2000. It is a version of i815E missing the integrated graphics and is similar to Apollo Pro133A chipset by VIA. Second, although VIA has long been the only company shipping chipsets for AMD Socket A processors, it risks to lose its dominance. ALi, SiS and AMD itself have already launched their own chipsets for this platform. Moreover, a number of other companies like NVIDIA, Micron and probably ATI are expected to join the core logic manufacturers this year. This way, the future looks no longer peachy for VIA.Read more
