VIA VT8237A Southbridge will support 192K 32Bit HDAudio and two SATA II features

According to our source, a new modification of VIA VT8237 Southbridge — VT8237A will support HDAudio (192K/32Bit), which will come in handy for playing games and watching movies (naturally).

Another interesting fact is that the new Southbridge won´t support SATA II, but will offer two features that have more relation to it than to the older SATA standard. These are Port Multiplier and Defer Spin Up. The former, according to the official specifications, is a "mechanism for one active host connection to communicate with multiple devices. A Port Multiplier can be thought of as a simple multiplexer where one active host connection is multiplexed to multiple device connections. Only one active host connection to the Port Multiplier is supported. The Port Multiplier is an extensible design that supports up to 15 device connections and utilizes the full bandwidth of the host connection."

As for Defer Spin Up (or Staggered Spin-up), according to another part of the official specs, "storage subsystems that include numerous Serial ATA hard disk drives are presented with power system design issues related to the current load presented during system power-up." So, Defer Spin Up is a "mechanism by which the storage subsystem controller(s) can sequence disk drive initialization and spin up." In other words, it´s used to properly accomodate power in certain situations like system launch.

VIA VT8237A Southbridge is expexted in volume production in Q2´2005 as well as the K8T935 chipset.

Traditionally, here´s the roadmap itself for your information:

Source: HKEPC

Write a comment below. No registration needed!