ABIT officially said that the decided not to use the chipset because it doesn't fit in with the current ABIT product development plan. They also noted that the PT880 Pro is a good chip and stable if that is any consolation for VIA and any readers that were looking forward to the board. In layman’s terms that means it doesn't fit in ABIT's niche consumer line of enthusiast products.
ABIT also commented on how well the ABIT nVIDIA C19 Intel motherboard solution is doing during development and have full intent to bring it to market still. Rumor on the net has C19 boards coming out in April.
In closing let's take a look at a board that almost made it to full production, but fell short at the last step...
The ABIT VT8:
ABIT showed off the VT8 Motherboard two months ago, which uses the VIA PT880 Pro chipset. It had four-phase power, bus speeds up to 1066MHz, AGP and PCI-E graphics slots, but only DDR1 memory slots. Because it has the older VT8237 south bridge, the board will not include HD Audio, RAID 5, or any PCI-E x1 slots. Just recently we have begun to see x1 PCIe slots hit the market, so this southbridge choice could end up interesting. ABIT was expecting boards to ship in March of 2005 based on the VIA chipset seen above, but instead canceled the board in March of 2005.
The Socket Area:
The VIA KT880 Pro Chipset:
We saw ABIT produce the VT7 and skip over the VT8, now time we talk about VIA and ABIT best guess it will be the VT9!