Skuzzy, I 110% agree with you when it comes to supporting chipsets.
If I had to sum up early Athlon/Athlon XP VIA chipsets in a word, that word would be "unreliable." I can't say that VIA didn't try their hardest to fix problems with their 4 in 1 drivers, but drivers can only do so much to compensate for 2nd rate hardware. My experience with VIAs early Athlon chipsets was that just when you think you had a stable system, some new piece of hardware would come along and not work correctly with them and you'd be doing the 4 in 1 shuffle all over again.
IMO the nForce chipsets were a godsend for AMD. I can't say that they are quite as good as Intel chipsets generally are, but they are inordinately better in every possible way than VIAs KT series. Probably the most interesting thing concerning the nForce chipset was that it was originally designed for the Pentium 3, and that it's development was funded largely by Microsoft for the xBox. When nVidia decided to get into the PC chipset business Intel decided not to grant a Pentium 4 bus license to them to avoid competition with their own chipsets. IMO if Intel hadn't pushed nVidia to release the nForce for the Athlon XP, AMD might not be in the CPU business today. The Athlon was always popular in the enthusiast market, but up until the release of nForce hardly any OEMs (other than some terrible machines made by Compaq) used their CPUs. The nForce 1 chipset was the first to offer dual channel DDR support, decent integrated graphics (GeForce 2 MX), and hardware accelerated sound. I think the integrated video and sound were the primary reasons why OEMs adopted the nForce, rather than the fact that they were much more stable than VIAs offerings. Probably the biggest problem I've had with the nForce chipsets are that they will not support a 2nd gameport and they will not officially support PCI graphics cards. (At least not without disabling the AGP to PCI bridge in device manager.)
I think AMD made a huge mistake in not offering their own chipsets in quantity and at a decent price point. Unfortunately their only single processor Athlon XP chipset, the AMD760 was too expensive for most board manufacturers. To cut costs they coupled the excellent 761 Northbridge, to possibly the worst Southbridge in history, the VIA 686b.
It doesn't really look like things have changed, as the AMD8000 series chipsets are going to be primarily used for 2, 4, and 8 way Opteron motherboards. Early reviews of the VIA K8T800 and nForce 3 150 chipsets have been in general impressed with their stability but both have drawbacks. The nForce 3 150 doesn't offer Soundstorm (the excellent hardware accelerated audio available with nForce 1 and 2, because nVidia is about to launch Soundstorm as a standalone soundcard) and lacks an integrated graphics option. (nVidia does plan on offering an nForce 3 variant with an integrated GeForce 4 Ti 4200, but that isn't planned for 9 months.) It also isn't quite as fast in gaming benchmarks as the VIA solution. This is going to make nForce 3 150 a tough sell for OEMs. The VIA solution is a very poor overclocker, as it does not offer an AGP clock lock option, making it a poor choice for enthusiasts who want to overclock.
AMD itself is taking a huge risk with the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX. They are using SOI (silicon on insulator) 200mm diameter wafers for production at their only modern fab in Dresden Germany. SOI is expensive compared to regular silicon wafers, but does offer lower power consumption and potentially higher clockspeeds because of reduced bulk capacitance. Sticking with 200mm wafers, instead of moving to 300mm wafers may also be risky. The die of the Athlon 64 is huge compared to the P4 and Athlon XP. (2x the size of Northwood in both transistor count and die area, and larger still than Barton.) Moving to 300mm wafers would allow a lot more CPUs per wafer and reduce manufacturing costs in the long run. AMD doesn't plan to do this until mid-2005 at the earliest in a joint venture to build a new fab with IBM. (SOI production was largely pioneered by IBM.) The last issue with Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX is the addition of the on die memory controller greatly increased the pin count of the processor, which makes the CPU package itself more expensive than Athlon XP. (754 and 939/940 pins versus 462 of Athlon XP.) To cut costs in the short term, AMD is using a ceramic package. Eventually to hit higher clockspeeds they will have to move back to a more expensive organic package though. The combination of all of this means that Athlon 64 is going to cost a LOT more to produce than Athlon XP and the Pentium 4. Since AMD has historically sold their CPUs much cheaper than Intel's competing models, their profit margins per CPU will be lower. AMD really needs the Athlon 64 to sell well to move back into the black, but unfortunately to add insult to injury they have been rumored to be unable to produce enough Athlon 64s to satisfy even the current demand for the Athlon 64 3200+. (I checked Techdata's site yesterday and the Athlon 64 3200+ is currently in allocation, meaning each distributor has a limited quanity available to them.) So once again, at least for now, AMD has managed to design an excellent CPU, but their old enemies of high production costs and inadequate chipset choices seem to be present once again. Hopefully that will change, as AMD going bankrupt would be a huge blow to the PC industry as a whole.
