Staking its claim as the first PCI Express chip set for the AMD Athlon processor, the K8T890 opens up the AMD64 processor platform (Athlon 64, Opteron, and Sempron CPUs) to PCI Express. It supports high-performance PCI Express x16 graphics cards that transfer data at 4 Gbytes/s, both upstream and downstream. The chip set additionally supports up to four PCI Express x1 connections for peripheral interfaces. Each x1 port offers a bandwidth of 250 Mbytes/s per direction. Based on the VIA Flex Express architecture, the chip set routes the PCI Express x1 connections directly through the North Bridge, avoiding potential data bottlenecks in the chip set's North-to-South Bridge link as well as reducing latency. In quantities of 1000 units, the k8T890 costs $30 each.
VIA Technologies Inc.
www.via.com.tw