VIA has dominated the AMD arena the last couple of years, and its latest offering is the KT400 chipset, which despite its name, only officially handles DDR333 memory. Many boards however do have limited support for DDR400, as well as AGP 8x. It's all thanks to the new VT8377 Northbridge.
The V8235 Southbridge is the same used in VIA's P4X400 chipset for the Pentium 4. It has six-channel audio and USB 2.0, but no FireWire. Even with all this, the KT400 pales against the nForce2 for features.
Introduction of a 533MB/s V-Link interconnection to the Southbridge doubles the bandwidth compared to the KT333, resulting in quick transfers between the Southbridge, hard disks and PCI cards.
VIA's KT400A Apollo chipset boasts DDR400 support, which provides a 20% increase in memory bandwidth to the CPU compared to DDR333. The revised KT400 also introduced native SATA support for up to four devices, as well as up to four parallel ATA devices.
VIA's FastStream64 technology also uses an extended array of prefetch buffers to reduce latency in the memory controller, improving performance at lower transistor cost than dual channel offerings.