VIA VT8261 South Bridge – Advanced Connectivity and Performance

The VIA VT8261 is a multimedia-focused south bridge chipset that offers an array of connectivity options and fast data transfer rates for VIA's latest north bridge digital media chipset solutions.

VIA VT8261 Feature Highlights

VIA Drive Station
The VIA DriveStation Controller Suite offers full support for the latest SATA II specification enhancements as defined by SATA-IO, including support for 3 Gb/s transfer rates, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), Port Multipliers and Hot Plug Connections.

Four SATA II ports for direct connection to up to four SATA master devices are supported featuring the latest 3.0Gb/s transfer rates while remaining backwards compatible with devices featuring 1.5Gb/s data transfer rate. Parallel ATA-133 Controller is also included allowing for full backwards compatibility with up to two Parallel ATA 133/100/66 devices delivering data transfer rates of up to 133 MB/s.

In combination with supporting drives, the VT8261 South Bridge enables support hot plug capabilities to boost drive reliability, allowing users to swap out a failed drive or add a new drive without taking down all the drives in an array.

VIA Vinyl HD Audio
As the PC platform increasingly becomes the central device for home entertainment, the HD Audio codecs provide home theatre quality performance with support for the latest high definition audio content in Blu-ray and other popular HD audio formats.

The VIA Vinyl HD audio codec is a low power, high-fidelity 8-channel high definition audio codec designed for desktop PC audio systems, supporting QSound, DTS Connect, Dolby1 Digital Live, Dolby PCEE program, SRS Lab and Creative technologies. Blu-ray and HD DVD Audi Content protection is also supported for full-rate lossless DVD audio, Blu-ray DVD, and HD DVD audio content playback.

VIA Connectivity
The VIA VT8261 includes support for up to 12 USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 support and a memory card reader with SD/MMS/MMC support. Networking is through the VIA Velocity VT6130 10/100/1000 Gigabit controller. Featuring a PCI 2.2 compliant PCI controller, the VT8251 offers support for up to five PCI slots, and supports a full range of legacy controllers, including GPIO LPC.

VIA V-MAP Architecture
As an integral component of VIA's unique V-MAP (VIA Modular Architecture Platform) Architecture, the VIA VT8261 has been designed to be fully compatible with a complete range of current and future VIA North Bridge designs.

VIA VT8261 Block Diagram

Resources

VIA VT8261 image kit