VIA will next month ship its P4M900 chipset, it has been claimed. The integrated part was announced in May this year, but VIA didn't specify when the product would be made available to motherboard makers.

According to Chinese-language website HKEPC, the chipset will ship in September.

The P4M900's key introduction is the Chrome9 HC DirectX 9-class graphics engine, upgraded from the current top-of-the-line P4M890 UniChrome Pro. The Chrome9 supports Shader Model 2.0, sufficient for Windows Vista Basic. However, the GPU does support HDTV output at up to 1080p resolution, and it can host an external PCI Express x16 graphics card, and there's an extra PCI Express lane off the North Bridge for other devices. The core is clocked at 250MHz.

The P4M900 supports frontside bus speeds of up to 1066MHz - so it can take Intel's Core 2 Duo desktop chip - and both DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM, the latter clocked at up to 667MHz. ®