VIA Apollo Pro 133: A Camino Preview

Keeping an eye on Camino

The Intel 820 chipset has become the butt of many jokes among quite a few industry analysts, motherboard manufacturers, and even your average hardware enthusiasts.  The reason behind all the snickering is because Intel was adamant about pushing Rambus DRAM as a requirement for the 820 chipset, which in itself seems like a positive move for the industry.  RDRAM is a more advanced memory technology and does offer more memory bandwidth than any memory technology available for the desktop market today.  But, after the motherboard manufacturers got a chance to take a look at RDRAM and the 820 and realized that the cost of investment was definitely not worth the end product, they began hoping for another solution.  

Motherboard manufacturers continued to manufacture new revisions of BX based motherboards, and the life of the BX chipset extended even further than the original expectations were.  From the end user's perspective this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it translates into you not having to go out and buy a new motherboard every 6 months to keep up just like with the graphics card industry.  From the perspective of Intel it isn't necessarily a good thing, as it translates into the possibility for another manufacturer to step up to the challenge and release something more advanced, before Intel can even get Camino out the door.

A common misunderstanding with Camino is that it will support RDRAM only, which is, at least according to Intel, not the case.  We had the benefit of talking to a few key representatives at Intel that were dealing directly with the progress on Camino and from their point of view, they are not forcing users to dive into Rambus at all.  The 820 (Camino) chipset supports both RDRAM and SDRAM by default, it is up to the motherboard manufacturer to decide whether or not to support "older" SDRAM with their motherboards.  The situation will most likely end up being very similar to the debates surrounding the SDRAM requirements of the 440LX chipset back in 1997.  The LX chipset supported both EDO and SDRAM, however Intel was strongly pushing SDRAM and the result ended up being that very few motherboard manufacturers produced a LX motherboard with support for EDO RAM although the chipset clearly supported the memory technology.  

Intel is considering support for PC133 on Camino, and it wouldn't be surprising at all if we saw Camino motherboards pop up with PC133 support with an eventual transition to Rambus as the yields on such products improve.  

Enter the VIA Apollo Pro 133 

Now we have VIA's alternative solution, if you recall, we just compared the Intel BX chipset to the VIA Apollo Pro and came away with the conclusion that, outside of performance, there was very little that set the two apart.  Most motherboard manufacturers like the idea of having a pin compatible chipset that would essentially "plug-in" to their current designs, thus eliminating the need to redesign for new chipsets and new memory designs, while adding support for the 133MHz FSB and AGP 4X.  This is what VIA is planning on accomplishing with the Apollo Pro 133.

The Apollo Pro 133 is the same 2 chip solution that made up the Apollo Pro and the Apollo Pro Plus, with two major changes, the official support for the 133MHz FSB, and the future support for AGP 4X.  Take away Rambus and doesn't this sound a lot like Intel's Camino chipset?  Let's dig deeper...