VIA Tech Forum 2000: DDR Is Coming

The new memory technology Double Data Rate or DDR received a lot of interest in June already at the Computex show in Taipei. Now first samples of motherboards and memory modules were shown at the recent VIA Tech Forum 2000.

Apparently VIA is trying to create a show similar to Intel's Developer Forum, which has become a significant technology convention with lots of key people and information about the latest PC technology. Instead of ferrying business partners and editors to the headquarters in Taiwan, VIA decided to hold the new symposium in five major cities. We attended the session in Munich, Germany, although it was held around the same time as Munich's world famous Oktoberfest , the world's largest convention for beer drinkers and party animals.

VIA's DDR-strategy is backed up by well-known motherboard companies like ABit, Asus, Chaintech, Epox or MSI. Infineon, Micron and NEC attended the session to represent the memory makers. AMD is one of the draught horses as well: They are currently working on the 760 chipset, featuring DDR support for Athlon and Duron processors.

The new Apollo Pro 266 chipset uses the North Bridge VT8633 (for Pentium III systems), which supports DDR SDRAM for the first time.