If you have been following the news on Processor Emporium recently, you will have noticed that there has been a little bit of a spat between VIA & Intel over the release of its Apollo Pro 133 chipset. Intel has claimed that VIA have infringed patent's it licenced to VIA when it allowed it to develop a P6 chipset. Well, the object of this dispute is about to be released & we are going to take a little look at whether it is a groundbreaking technology or just another chipset.

VIA have been sucessful in the chipset market in the past year, due to their MVP3 (Super Socket 7) & Apollo Pro Plus (Slot 1) chipsets. It is now the turn of VIA to become the innovator in the chipset market whilst Intel is occupied trying to sort out its problems with the i820 chipset & Direct Rambus memory. Is the Apollo Pro 133 an Intel beater, well, read on...

VIA Apollo Pro 133, what does it do?

The Apollo Pro 133 is very much a "classical" architechture chipset unlike the i810 & future K7 chipsets, in that it features a VT82C6983A North Bridge & VT82C686A South Bridge Controllers. The North Bridge controller looks after memory, PCI & AGP bus functions whilst the South Bridge deals with PCI-ISA & IDE controllers. Overall this is in line with other current VIA chipsets & the Intel i440 BX chipset. It does not feature the advanced Unified Hub architechture which is present on the i810 chipset and will form the basis in future Intel chipset architechture.

The main feature of the VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset is of course its support for a 133 MHz Front Side Bus. This is currently the first chipset to do so, although most BX & VIA chipset motherboards have settings capable of running this function. The difference is that the Apollo Pro 133 chipset allows an FSB setting of 133 MHz without overclocking the PCI & AGP buses. The whole issue of 133 MHz FSB support was VIA's engineers equipping the chipset with an AGP divider of 2 thus allowing it to achieve the 66 MHz needed for the AGP bus to run.

The Apollo Pro Plus also allows users to set their memory bus speed asynchronos to their Front Side Bus. This means that the Apollo Pro 133 can run its CPU on a 133 MHz FSB, whilst its memory can run at either 100 or 66 MHz. This means that users do not need to upgrade their memory, but the availability of PC-133 SDRAM means that if buying memory, this is definitely the choice to be made.

The Apollo Pro 133 also features support for U/DMA 66 hard disks. It also features support for an Audio/Modem riser card which is featured on the i810 chipset & allows the running of a software modem or sound card.

So to find out what the new Apollo Pro 133 chipset can offer the end user, read on...

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