Responding to recent rising demand for its KT333 chipsets, VIA Technologies has decided to launch a remarked KT400 product to fill up the supply shortage. However, motherboard makers are wary about the change, as the remarked chipset cannot be applied on PCBs used for the former KT333.

The major specification difference between the current KT400 and the remarked version lies in their AGP technology support. The present KT400 supports AGP 8x, while the remarked chipset offers only AGP 4x graphics function.

VIA said that shipments of the remarked KT400 will begin at the end of this month, or early October. The chipset supplier plans to simplify its product portfolio by gradually reducing the number of its major product lines from three (the KT266A, KT333 and KT400) to two (the KT266A and KT400). However, it stressed that the product life of the KT333 will last until the end of December.

The launch of the remarked chipset, interpreted by many board makers as VIA’s announcement of the end of KT333 production, raised questions in the motherboard industry. Some manufacturers said that they did not understand why VIA made the decision, especially as the KT333 has been a rather popular, mainstream product in the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)-platform market, where VIA still holds a market share of 60-70%.

The incompatibility of PCBs is another issue board makers have been worried about. Seeing the product popularity, many manufacturers have quite a few chipsets or PCBs on hand at present. The introduction of a remarked KT400 is likely to build up their inventory pressure.

Earlier, similar tight supply was also reported in the Pentium 4 chipset market. According to sources, shipments of the SiS648 Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) had stopped for two to three weeks after the company delivered its first batch of products at the end of July, and some board makers were forced to delay shipments until this month accordingly. However, the problem recently was solved.

Source: DigiTimes