Jack Robertson EBN (03/10/2003 8:13 AM EST)

Via Technologies Inc. on Monday introduced an upgraded Apollo KT400A chipset for Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon XP processors, including the new Barton 3000+.

The Taiwan chipmaker said the new chipset uses an expanded array of prefetch buffers to reduce latency in the memory controller. As a result, officials said the chipset is 10% faster than the previous Apollo KT400 in 3D applications.

The enhanced single channel memory KT400A is poised to compete against Nvidia Corp.'s nForce2 AMD-compatible chipset which can support two memory channels.

The new Via chipset supports memory speeds through DDR400 and process bus speeds through 333MHz, according to the company. It has native support for two Serial ATA channels and also six-channel audio surround sound. The KT400A also supports AGP8X graphics and up to eight USB 2.0 ports, Via said.