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The month of August saw SE make the hefty trek over to the island of Taiwan (just 90miles east of The People's Republic of China for the Geographer amongst you) to get the low-down on the motherboard industry and its reaction to the current state of affairs between Intel and AMD. After all you can have all the CPUs you want but you need a motherboard… When Carly Simon sang "Nobody does it better" she probably wasn't referring to Taiwan's motherboard manufacturing industry but she may as well have been. Taiwan has long been an important factor in both of the aforementioned companies getting the backing they need in order to support their product globally. Thus we visited the top tier mainboard manufactures, ASUS, GigaByte and MSI as well as the likes of Acer, Abit and AOpen to name but a few.
There's no doubt that AMD's Athlon has been exceptionally well received worldwide. In terms of technology, AMD's R&D team has evidently done a marvelous job and given end-users a real alternative to WINTEL based PCs. But what about Taiwan, what have been the repercussions? So far so good, GigaByte, MSI and FIC slot-A based motherboards have all hit the SE labs and worked exceptionally well. BoiStar and QDI have since announced Slot-A based mainboards (QDI's is called KinetiZ 7) and even more support is pending. The Problem? Well the chipset isn't from VIA, Ali or even SiS- it's from AMD. The word from motherboard manufacturers is clear- all current bets are on VIA's chipset, which is set to be released first and should indeed become the number one choice. VIA chipsets were due to sample at the end of August with production starting
in Q4. Should things go particularly well, we were told that we might start seeing VIA-based Athlon motherboards as early as October. Ali is hoping that their missed opportunities in terms of the Athlon will be tempered slightly with their Aladdin 7 M1561 integrated graphics part. Interestingly enough the former engineers at 3dfx who spun off to form ARTx (and are providing the 3D chip for Nintendo's Dolphin console) will be providing the graphics chip for Ali.
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