Inside VIA: Beneath the Hull of WenChi's Ship

Bread & Butter with a Hammer

VIA's working Hammer demonstration at Computex gave their K8HTA platform a good deal of credibility as it is more than any of the competition could say for their chipsets (excluding AMD of course). The K8HTA that was running in VIA's suite had an unusual heatsink and fan on the AGP 8X bridge and ran fairly warm, however the board that was running at VIA's headquarters had no cooling on the AGP bridge at all.

VIA's Hammer Demo

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The K8HTA AGP controller running without a heatsink.

It turns out that the AGP bridge on the board at Computex was actually a FIBed chip and in order to ensure stability the engineers wanted to offer additional cooling for the chip. As you may remember from our Inside Intel article, a Focused Ion Beam (FIB) tool is used to correct problems with the logic or wiring of a circuit after the chip has already been manufactured without having to respin the silicon. With Computex being a very time critical show it isn't too surprising that VIA was running a FIBed part since it saves a considerable amount of time as you don't have to remanufacture the chip once you've fixed the problem, you can use it as is. Since VIA is fab-less we'd assume that TSMC did the FIBing of the chip for the demo K8HTA platform.

Obviously there were no performance measurements or anything else to be provided regarding Hammer but it's good to see that more boards are actually up and running with VIA's Hammer chipset.

VIA is taking an approach similar to NVIDIA's when dealing with integrated graphics and Hammer, they will be using the Hammer's integrated memory controller and working with AMD to employ whatever techniques necessary to reduce memory access latencies. VIA also told us that there are some improvements that AMD could make to the Hammer core that would improve UMA (unified memory architecture) performance. They weren't clear about whether the first release of Hammer will have these improvements or not. Since Hammer will be targeted at the high end market initially it may make sense for AMD to focus on those types of internal improvements when spinning off a lower end version of the core.