K8T900 in the flesh
In order to give us a first look at the K8T900, VIA supplied us with a reference board based on its new chipset. This board may be the basis for various motherboard makers' K8T900 implementations, but it's not intended to be a commercial product itself.
The K8T900 reference board
The reference board bears the hallmarks of a dual-graphics-capable mobo, including a pair of PCI slots with a "paddle" card familiar from various SLI mobos. Insert it one way to direct all 16 lanes of PCI-E to a single graphics card, or flip it over to effect an 8+8 split between two slots.
VT8251 at last!
I just had to snap a picture of the Duke Nukem Forever of the chipset world, the VT8251. VIA was talking about this chipset in June of 2004, yet this is the first working version of the thing that's made it into our hands. When I first saw it, I was almost in disbelief.
That notion was punctured quickly, however, by some disappointing realities: VIA doesn't yet have a driver for Windows XP that supports the VT8251's advanced SATA capabilities like AHCI (and thus Native Command Queuing), and they don't expect to have one ready until some time in the first quarter of next year. That will hamper our ability to assess the VT8251 silicon significantly. Similarly, VIA could not provide us with an audio driver that would work with the reference board's combination of the VT8251 audio controller and the Realtek ALC880 HD audio codec. In fact, we couldn't get any sort of sound out of the reference board at all, so we were forced to conduct our testing without audio.
Anyhow, we can give you a short sneak preview of the K8T900's abilities in other areas, but a full evaluation will have to wait until we have real, end-user motherboards and actual drivers from VIA for the hardware. Obviously, even though we have working silicon for the north bridge and south bridge chips, VIA is still some distance from being ready to ship fully functional end-user products based on the K8T900.
MultiChrome takes on SLI and CrossFire
I've already done a quick-and-dirty write-up of S3's MultiChrome multi-GPU technology, but I'll give you a refresher here. The GPUs involved are S3's new Chrome S27 chips. S3 hopes to sell Chrome S27 cards for $99 that rival the performance of a GeForce 6600 GT. With eight pixel shaders and 700MHz core and memory clocks, the Chrome S27 might just meet that target.
MultiChrome will allow folks to pair up a couple of Chrome S27 cards for more performance, and like the low-end SLI and CrossFire solutions from NVIDIA and ATI, MultiChrome does not require (and has no provision to use) any sort of external bridge connector or video pass-through cable between the two cards. Pixels rendered by the second GPU in a MultiChrome setup are simply passed to the first card via PCI Express. Also like CrossFire and SLI, MultiChrome will use multiple rendering modes in order to split up the workload between cards. Alternate frame rendering and split-frame rendering are both supported, and application-specific profiles in S3's video drivers will dictate which load-balancing method is used with each game.
Although VIA is emphasizing its competency to create a complete chipset and multi-GPU solution, it's also being realistic about its position in the market. Rather than attempting to lock users into an all-VIA/S3 setup in order to run dual GPUs, MultiChrome will be a cross-platform solution that should work on non-VIA chipsets.
Fortunately, we were able to get a short demonstration of MultiChrome in action, right in the belly of Damage Labs, and we came away with some benchmark numbers.
