VIA Apollo Pro 266: The P3 gets DDR

Final Words

The Pentium III isn't going to be able to take much advantage of DDR SDRAM, much like it wasn't able to take advantage of the higher bandwidth RDRAM offered when it was first introduced to the P3 back in 1999. However unlike the i820/RDRAM launch of 1999, VIA may have hit on something interesting with the Apollo Pro 266.

Granted, there is no reason to upgrade your i815 to an Apollo Pro 266 unless you are absolutely in dire need of more memory bandwidth. Applications in which memory bandwidth is in great demand will obviously benefit from the Apollo Pro 266, however for the majority of AnandTech readers, the Pro 266 does not offer any tangible performance gains over the i815.

But that isn't necessarily what VIA hoped to accomplish with the Apollo Pro 266. If DDR SDRAM can get to a point where it is just as affordable as PC133 SDRAM, VIA may be able to package the Apollo Pro 266 + PC2100 DDR SDRAM solution as a healthy alternative to Intel's 815. It seems like the market wouldn't have much of a problem adopting a higher bandwidth platform if it were priced identically to the i815 + PC133 setup which is selling quite well today.

Being able to market a product and it being worth it are two different things however. And in this case, the Apollo Pro 266 is simply not necessary for the Pentium III platform from a performance standpoint. The introduction of VIA's DDR SDRAM controller and V-Link are quite possibly the two most important features that we should take from the Apollo Pro 266 chipset, since those two features will definitely find their way into other, more memory bandwidth hungry platforms.