VIA Technologies Inc has thumbed its nose at Intel Corp and started shipping the Apollo Pro 133A chipset. The P6-based chipset is the cause of the legal wrangling between the Taiwanese company and Intel, which accuses VIA of patent infringement and is trying to block the firm’s x86 licensing deal with National Semiconductor Corp.
VIA has already gathered support for its chipset – the first to support the PC133 memory specification – in the wake of Intel’s debacle with its 820 Camino Rambus DRAM chipset. IBM Corp and Micron Computer Corp have both announced systems based on the chipset.
The chipset has a 133MHz-frontside bus (FSB) and supports AGP 4x while remaining backward compatibility with AGP 2X, 66/100MHz FSB and PC66/100. The chipset also sports Slot 1 and Socket 370 connections making it suitable for everything from the newest Pentium III to a lowly Celeron. NatSemi is building the Apollo for VIA in a 0.35-micron process, priced at $34 in OEM quantities.
