VIA Launches Apollo P4X266 Chipset for P4 (officially)

As most of you know, VIA doesn't have a license to build and sell chipsets for the P4. Or, to put it more accurately, VIA says that the chipset is covered cross-licenses and patents it holds, as we've learned from The Inquirer . Remarkably, so far Intel has not begun any legal action (aside from threats). Cutting to the chase, VIA just announced that it has commenced volume shipments of the VIA Apollo P4X266 DDR SDRAM chipset for the P4. The P4X266 combines a 400MHz Front Side Bus with support for up to 4GB of DDR266 SDRAM and provides a peak bandwidth of 2.1GB per second. To P4X266 supports a choice of 423-pin and the forthcoming 478-pin versions of the P4, as well as PC133 SDRAM. It also includes AGP 4X, ATA 100 support, and a V-Link bus that doubles communication bandwidth between the North and South Bridge to 266MB per second. The VIA Modular Architecture Platform (V-MAP) allows customers to couple the North Bridge with a variety of South Bridge chips depending on their required feature sets. These include the VT8233 and the VT8233C, which features an integrated 3Com 10/100Mb Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC) as well as built-in AC'97 audio, MC'97 modem support, 6 USB ports, and Advanced Power Management. The VIA Apollo P4X266 chipset is manufactured by S3 Graphics, and is priced at $34 in OEM quantities. The same Inquirer story cited earlier mentions that a major motherboard manufacturer is all ready to go with boards based on VIA's new chipset. We thought we'd hear the lawyers' battle drums long before this, so maybe VIA has a point about its licenses and patents. Or, more likely, the lawyers from both sides have been talking about the issue for some time and just haven't let us know what's going on.