NVIDIA'S Nforce 2 Ultra 400 is going to get real dual channel Athlon XP competition very soon and as we previously reported.
We can now confirm that the KT880 is a K7 chipset that will support all of the Athlons up to 3200+ with its FSB 400 MHz and of course with support for DDR up to 400 MHz since it cannot go faster if you don’t want to overclock.

This is Via's first step into the dual channel DDR 400 arena – although even its KT600 still single channel was very competitive to the Nforce 2 Ultra 400.

Read more: The Inquirer.

Isn't it kind if late ? I'm amazed that there is still some development happening on the K7 side of things.

Abit has announced its AN7, which is the NFS-7 with the uGuru chip. Only problem is nVidia never released it's MCP with native SATA support so Abit has to go with an add-on chip. SATA is the only edge Via has over nVidia & it doesn't seem like nVidia feels the need to fix that for the nForce.

That's one way of seeing it... the other is that Athlon XPs keep selling very well and this is a good indication that AMD has plans to extend the life of the now "low-end" K7 family.

I do understand that, but I don't think that it's a smart move on AMD's behalf. I think having the most 64-bit chips out there is the best way to get developpers to take that platform seriously.

Which is also why I don't understand their plans to move the AthlonXP ( 32-bit ) to the socket-754 format.

Where did you read this?

The Paris & Palermo Core for the desktop are AthlonXP on the Socket-754. The L2 has also been lowered to 256K.

AMD Athlon XP to Migrate to Socket 754

That's crazy, I had not heard that before

Thanks for getting me up to speed Didou!