Jason Dunn
03-23-2004, 07:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115309,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115309,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div>"Via Technologies will announce in May a DDR2- and PCI Express-ready chipset, the PT890, says Richard Brown, a Via associate vice president. Via is already demonstrating the chipset on its stand at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover, Germany. The demonstration model is running with DDR400 but Via says it is ready for double data rate 2, and all subsequent chipsets will be so, as well. It is being shown with a 3.7GHz Intel Pentium 4 and a 800MHz frontside bus."<br /><br />You've got to love a company like VIA - they consistently beat Intel at their own game, which requires some serious engineering skill. DDR2 is going to be a significant step forward for us digital media types: it will effectively read/write four times as much as DDR1 per cycle, and it will do so at a lower voltage (which means less heat). This means that hurling multi-megapixel images around will be faster, and video editing will also see a boost. This is a future-moving technology though, and if you're using DDR400 right now you wouldn't notice much of a change. Moving forward, DDR2533 and beyond will become the standard.<br /><br />PCI Express will also provide a boost in speed (250 megabits per second, almost twice as fast as current PCI cards), and the cards will be smaller, which means smaller overall computers (one would hope).