This was a nice article. The most important thing I picked up is that there are some boards out there about ready to ship!!!!
Additionally, I would expect more improvement from PC2100 over the preview. As Anand pointed out, the Mustang and its derivatives will really benefit from this memory.
I have been hearing that recent benchmarks place the P4 about even or somewhat behind a PIII 1.13GHz when it is a 1.5Ghz. If these rumors are even close to true, the AMD processors (even the current ones) with DDR systems will have no problem with the Intel competition.
Incidentally, VIA is sort of barking up the wrong tree. The PIII FSB will limit the advantages of DDR SDRAM. It really doesn't do much good to have memory bandwidth of 2.1Gb/sec when the FSB can only transfer 1Gb/sec through the CPU.
I think AMD is doing the right thing by producing their own chipset. It was their intent to allow 3rd party partners to do what they do best in order to allow AMD to do what they do best; however, it seems that all this did was allow Intel a way of pressuring 3rd party AMD partners into delaying chipset releases (KM133 and KT133) as well as limiting availiblity (KT133) in order to keep AMD from gaining more market share.
With P4 due out next month as well as AMD's DDR chipset based mb's in the near future, it is going to be an interesting fall!
Now were is the new video cards? How's about an NV12, Rampage, and Radeon MAXX release?