Yesterday VIA Technologies released their long-awaited VT8237 South Bridge that brings among other things, native Serial ATA support, which is something VIA had been lacking the last few months.

 

Now instead of VIA motherboards partners having to place a SATA controller chip on each of their products, they have native support through VIA's new South Bridge which will ultimately bring down the cost on VIA based motherboards.

 

Taipei, Taiwan, 2 July 2003 - VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, today announced the introduction of the advanced new VIA VT8237 South Bridge, which can be coupled with the complete range of VIA core logic North Bridges for ultimate performance and connectivity across the full spectrum of Intel®, AMD and VIA processor platforms. Featuring the world's first integrated multi-configuration Serial ATA/RAID controller, the VIA VT8237 will be key to driving the Serial ATA hard disk drive technology mainstream and facilitating the performance and data integrity benefits of RAID across a wider platform.

Meanwhile, VIA Arena posted a humorous video about VIA's new SATA DriveStation Advanced Controller Suite software - You can think of it as The Discovery Channel nature edition meets every day computing. You'll understand what I mean when you see the video.

 

More information @ VIA Technologies