Care to say why not? Is that being based on the Granite Bay introduction a few weeks back?
I won't speak for Evan, but, KT400A is supposed to be bringing Dual Channel DDR to the Athlon. That's all that needs to be said. The Athlon really can't make any use of the bandwidth provided by Dual Channel DDR333. nForce2 in most apps (save Professional 3D) gets absoletly no benefit from Dual Channel DDR333/400 (highest increase according to
this is 3.2%, except for SPECviewperf). And I will add, that the main reason nForce2 gets anything out of DCDDR in SPECview perf is due to DASP, so VIAA would have to duplicate/exceed nForce2's DASP. Here's what Anand said on the next page of that article about the improvements in SPECviewperf:
The combination of these two improvements to NVIDIA's DASP results in very competitive performance and in some cases, a significant performance boost when using DualDDR. It is the improved DASP that NVIDIA attributes the extremely large performance gains in SPECviewperf to. But if SPECviewperf were the only situation that the second generation DASP improved performance in it wouldn't be all that useful, so where else will the new DASP increase performance?
Unfortunately most of the situations where DASP and DualDDR will really make a performance difference are difficult to quantify; it's a problem we, as well as NVIDIA, have had a tough time solving. SPECviewperf is a good example of a situation where you're bound by the ability of the memory controller to fulfill requests which is where nForce2's dual memory controllers can come in handy.
So, honestly, the bottom line is that KT400A will need to have significant optimization improvments over nForce2 (in both chipset, and IDE drivers) to be able to make a difference. Plus, VIA can't compete with nForce2's feature set (5.1 Audio, 2 LAN chips, USB2 and Firewire, and GF4MX video). Just my 2c