VIA Hardware has posted a preview on the VIA KT266 chipset.

With the release of the KX133 in early 2000, the AMD Athlon finally had a cheap, stable platform from which it could attack Intel´s marketshare. Many excellent boards, such as Abit´s KA7 and ASUS´s K7V drew in the enthusiast market that AMD is so popular with now. With the release of the Socket A form factor from AMD, it was found that KX133 was incompatible with higher clock speed Socket A processors. Thus, KZ133 (later KT133) was born.

It was with this chipset that VIA has dominated the Athlon market. KT133 has proven itself quite a mature, stable, and high performing platform for the Athlon, but lately many successors have attempted to usurp its monopoly on the Socket A market. A PC133 chipset from SiS started the attack, which was then intensified by DDR products from ALi and even AMD themselves. KT133A, an update to KT133 supporting 133MHz FSB processors, has also challenged KT133.

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