VIA pipped Nvidia to the post today by announcing the first chipsets to support AMD's Socket AM2 platform, though most motherboards launched today appear to be based on the as-yet-unannounced - officially anyway - Nvidia nForce 500 series.

VIA's offerings that are ready to support Socket AM2 processors include the K8T900 and K8T890 discrete chipsets and the integrated K8M890 part. None are new and they all hook up to the processor across a 1GHz HyperTransport bus.

All three chipsets provide a 16 PCI Express lanes off the North Bridge out to a graphics card, though the K8T900 can use them to support two PCI Express x8 slots for dual-card set-ups.

VIA suggested any of the chips could easily be pared with its VT8251 South Bridge, which brings Gigabit Ethernet; support for up to for 3Gbps SATA drives in RAID 0, 1, 0+1 or JBOD configurations; the ability to handle up to four parallel ATA 133 peripherals; eight-channel HD audio and eight USB ports to the table. ®

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