This is one area at launch where the Athlon is reminiscent of the launch of the Pentium II back in 1997. Although the chips have appeared, where are the motherboards? Well, as with the PII, they are on their way.

Initially, all Athlon motherboards will ship with the AMD 750 (Irongate) chipset. This is very much an interim measure very like the use of the i440FX with early PII’s in 1997, as the main chipset’s are yet to appear. The main chipsets are going to be produced by VIA, Ali and SiS and should be appearing in motherboard designs in a few weeks.

Current motherboards at are:

Motherboards based upon the VIA Apollo KX133 should be appearing sometime in the new year. This new chipset from VIA will include PC-133 SDRAM support and AGP 4X. Motherboards scheduled to appear when the VIA Apollo KX133 are:

More manufacturers are likely to join this list.

This list was only relevant at the time of publishing (Oct 1999). Many manufacturers released KX133 based boards in 2000 and many of these are being followed up by Socket A based boards based upon the VIA Apollo KT133 chipset.

Architechture.

Availability.