According to internal documents seen by the Inq, the combination of an AMD Barton and Nvidia's Nforce 2 could beat Intel 3GHz+ Pentium 4 processors by a considerable margin, with or without hyperthreading. In fact, AMD is expecting this margin to be as large as 25% using a selected set of benchmarks.
The same document revealed a considerable performance difference between nForce2 based boards and VIA KT400 series... in the meantine however, both VIA and SiS are said to be ready for delivering 400MHz FSB chipsets to the market when the Barton arrives.
Following the recent launch of its K7-based KT400A chipset, VIA is planning to release one more product, the KT600, for the AMD platform in May. According to sources, the KT600 (codenamed KT400A-CE) is pin-to-pin compatible with the KT400A (codenamed KT400A-CD), but is designed to support a 400MHz FSB. The KT400A only supports a 333MHz FSB.