Via Technologies and other chipset makers could be in for a new round of legal flak from Intel, as the chipmaker seeks to protect its newly introduced fast system bus.
Intel on Monday introduced the 850E chipset and three new Pentium 4 processors, all equipped to transfer data to and from memory at 533MHz, up from 400MHz with older chips. But third-party chipset makers such as Via, Silicon Integrated Systems (SIS), Nvidia and ATI require a special license to make Pentium 4-compatible products using the faster bus speed, even if they are already licensed to make 400MHz-bus chipsets. The chipset enables the processor to communicate with other parts of a PC system, like memory and input/output devices.
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