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VIA Quits Motherboard Chipset Business
arcticstoat writes "Following the media hit that was VIA's Nano processor, VIA says that it's now quitting the motherboard chipset business that used to be its bread and butter product for years. VIA's vice president of corporate marketing in Taiwan, Richard Brown, explained that: 'Intel provides the vast majority of chipsets for its processors and, following its purchase of ATI, AMD is also moving very quickly in the same direction.' VIA will still be developing chipsets for integrated motherboards featuring the Nano CPU, but will no longer produce chipsets for Intel and AMD CPUs. Was this the right decision, and where does this leave other third-party chipset manufacturers such as SiS?" Seems like this is a tough business to stick around in.
competition is a good thing.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
where does this leave other third-party chipset manufacturers such as SiS?
Up shit creek without a paddle?
I still get a chuckle opening up old PCs and finding the infamous VIAgra logo. Just imagine the marketing possibilities. Gives a whole new meaning to the (hard)core gamer.
I can't understand making that move at all.
Sure there may be competition in the market, but at least it's a market they're already a big player in.
Attempting to jump into the CPU business (almost) exclusively is likely to kill them, since AMD and Intel have the market fairly well tied up.
They should have quit years ago. They mainly had the bottom of the business and their chipsets just never quite worked right. From the first super-seven chipset of the pentium era that was almost as stable as intel to the athlon chipset I have that doesn't support PCI busmastering. Between the board makers and VIA you knew there was always going to be something wrong.
Now that there are cheap boards from other manufacturers that are stable and have good drivers they have no reason to be in that market.
It's not the size of your stack that matters, it's how you push and pop
Now that Nvida is leaving.. ati/amd , Via was really the only othere quality alternative.. frig sis is always a last resort.. What the heck is going on..? so all there is left is intel ? and a wait and see with sis? ARgh@!#$%
This is a sensible choice for VIA, for the reasons they have given. It's been on the table for quite some time I imagine.
However a big thanks have to go out for them for their initial support of the AMD Athlon platform back in the day. Even if they had chipset problems since then...
Now, however, they are quite a bit behind in terms of chipsets for desktop systems.
I'd like to see a Nano with built-in chipset (memory controller, GPU at least) or even a SoC (Nano, Memory Controller, GPU, USB, Ethernet, SATA, Audio, ...) in the future, and now they can allocate resources to achieve this.
I have had mixed experience with third party setups, that has incrementally gotten better over the years. The Intel offerings never really had great appeal to me outside the server area. So, is vendor lock-in (and lack of competition) going to be any good for the PC builders out there? I myself would rather see healthy competition...
Seems like this is a tough business to stick around in.
Considering Nvidia reject the reports of its exit from the chipset market out of hand and demanded a retraction from the original source (Digitimes), I don't think that story is worth linking to...
I had a few mainboards with VIA-Chips, but it just never worked that well. Especially their drivers are horrible. Looks like I'm not the only one who hasn't bought anything from VIA in a long time.
My guess is occupying the same sub-par penny-pinching section of the market they always did. Save $10, and in exchange you got to deal with chipsets that often had fundamental flaws, known bugs, and drivers that fixed some problems while causing others.
But don't worry, because said chipsets were often located on "high quality" boards that could always be counted on to be constructed in the cheapest manner possible. Bad caps? That's too easy; I want heatsinks that fall off the chipset, voltage problems on PCI slots, and physical layout that looks as though it was designed by a blind man using NASA's English-to-Metric conversion tools.
To this day I am convinced that a large amount of the "Windows Sucks and always crashes" reputation in the post-9x era is due largely to VIA, SIS, and (God help us) Acer Labs (ALi) coupled with the sub-par manufacturers that leaned heavily on these chipsets.
Losing the slower / lower quality players can only be a good thing. Now if only SIS would do the same.
The ultraportables is a fast growing market, and if, as I suspect, VIA focuses on cheap low-consumption CPU + chipset, they are in a great position to capitalize from this market.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I haven't seen a SiS chipset in years! Do they still even make anything that is used? Honestly, I haven't used anything but NVidia in the last few years and they quite frankly work REALLY well!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
I have one older PC that had this sort of problem - until a driver update that brought a workaround.
AFAIK the VIA chipset had a fundamental flaw in the first place (data loss on the PCI bus under high load) but such flaws happen to other vendors too and a workaround in the driver is usually acceptable. In this case, the problem showed up in the field and VIA only fixed it after getting bad publicity.
C - the footgun of programming languages
...I'm not sure how they'll do without, but look at what's happening with the latest processors. The memory controller and more and more other things are moving into one and the same chip. it won't be long before laptops are essentially one chip with traces going out to all the accessories = much simpler than today because almost all the heavy lifting is inside the chip.except memory and the only reason I don't see that going in is because none of the players have taken any interest in that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> I can't understand making that move at all.
It makes a lot of sense. They were always chasing tail lights when developing chipsets to support Intel + AMD CPUs, whereas now they'll be in exclusive control of their device interface specifications and no longer be competing against chipsets from those other manufacturers.
It's good on all fronts for VIA.
It's less good for customers of Intel and AMD since some competition disappears, but I don't think that that will really matter. Both Intel and AMD make their large profits from CPUs, not from their motherboard chipsets as those are not "sexy" enough to command large margins, so competition from VIA didn't actually have any significant impact on chipset pricing.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It's worth noting that nVidia are also moving into the system-on-chip market with their Cortex A8 + GPU system. They aren't leaving the chipset market yet, but they seem to be aware that the market won't exist for much longer.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I suppose overall I don't feel good about this move. Can't really articulate why. This doesn't seem auspicious for us enthusiast builders who like to pick out individual components based on their individual merits. (In my experience, VIA chipsets have always performed nicely.)
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
NVidia != VIA (One can has an extra N, I and D)
Less choices = bad. There really aren't a lot of chipset makers, and with VIA exiting the business and nVidia's rumored exit, there won't be much left especially for AMD users. What are VIA's CPUs going to run on?
Where IS the "-1, wrong" mod? That was nVidia, this is Via.
From hell's heart I stab at thee!
/w Intel chip and Intel video card - add a VIA USB card and POOF! There goes your stability. All I can hope for is that they go completely out of business and perhaps have a few higher-ups in the company spontaneously combust.
I hate VIA if you didn't gather that already. I've spent more time puzzling over ACPI, bus mastering, faulty IRQ sharing, piss poor drivers that VIA has made than all other OEM's put together. Even if you have a fully functional Intel chipset board
Hey, couldn't they move into communications and call themselved VIACOM? ... oh, wait.
America, Home of the Brave.
Who the heck is going to make chipsets for AMD motherboards now? I used via for years, now they are gone, then I used AMD, which they no longer make chipsets, and my current motherboard has an nVidia chipset? Is this the death of AMD, cause it seems as if the only people still making chipsets now is Intel
I was so badly 'wounded' by this chipset as most enthusiasts were that to this day I've never considered a VIA chipset since, most likely an irrational fear but one thing I can't stand is an unstable computer.
I've used nvidia chipsets, intel chipsets, even SIS chipsets but VIA only once and it stung, I have to wonder how many enthusiasts avoided them due to the 133a fiasco.
I used to be a big Via fan, back during the K7 and early K8 days. This saddens me, even though I buy 100% Intel nowadays (Intel CPU, Intel chipset, Intel motherboard).
Man, AMD buying ATI was possibly the worst possible decision they could have made. They raped their third-party chipset support, drove off Linux users en masse, and blew all their capital on an acquisition instead of the R&D they desperately needed, hence why Core 2 has lapped Phenom several times.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
In response to this fiasco, Intel engaged more directly with the chipset vendors; at the time, VLSI Technology was the leading one. Intel was in the process of coming out with the original Pentium, and VLSI needed detailed specifications so that they could have chipsets available when the processor debuted. Intel promised VLSI information as quickly as Intel's own engineers had it.
Since VLSI had an operation in Chandler, very near Intel's own chipset design operations, VLSI inevitably heard when Intel started up their own chipset team. VLSI was understandably concerned that they were becoming dependent on cooperation from a company that had gone into competition with them, and approached Intel. Intel reassured VLSI that Intel's team would not have any "unfair" advantage over VLSI's engineers, and reiterated that VLSI would have processor specifications as soon as Intel's engineers did.
So, VLSI worked away at their design. Intel released the final Pentium specs, and the Intel chipset engineers accomplished an unheard-of feat: they finished their design, streamed out the chip, fabricated it, packaged it, tested it, and released samples the same day!
Later, Intel found other ways to make life difficult for chipset companies, such as suing chipset vendors for using their bus designs or pricing the processor plus chipset at the same price as the processor alone. This has periodically led to chipset vendors deciding that the business isn't worth it, followed by Intel screwing the pooch with a chipset design, followed by Intel realizing that having more than one chipset provider is good for the processor business, followed by Intel making nice to the chipset vendors, lather, rinse, repeat.
Here we go again. This could be the last time around the merry-go-round, or maybe not.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Sometimes these rumours turn out to be true, despite the protestations of the company. There are many examples out there, iphone, banks, etc...
Although VIA will still be developing chipsets for integrated motherboards featuring the Nano CPU, but will no longer produce chipsets for Intel and AMD CPUs.
Although this contradicts the headline directly, but it is also gramatically incorrect.
I will miss your AMD chipsets VIA. The ones I have used have been rock solid and your driver support, especially for older chipsets was GREAT!
Nvidia on the other hand comes out with unstable chipsets, sells a bunch of them with shoddy drivers and then releases a new version and drops driver support for the old ones. Been burned more than once with NVidia's AMD chipsets. I sure hope AMD comes out with it's own Chipset because there isn't a really good option now that VIAs gone.
I would like to see a CPU + coreboot (Linux) embedded with a connection block as a single monolithic unit. Defeats the necessity of having an installed OS chosen by the hardware vendor. I would guess this type of product would be vastly more competitive.
Anybody who has ever owned a motherboard with a VIA chipset knows that it is total crap. I have owned a lot of motherboards over the years, and the only motherboards that I ever had problems with had VIA chipsets. Thei are crap and their drivers are even worse. If you ever had the "pleasure" of installing their hyperion drivers you know what I am talking about. The worst of it all is that they never acknowledge that there are any problems.
ATI has better on board video then intel so NVidia can start makeing more intel chipsets with sli and good on board video as well the amd chip set for the people who want sli on amd system.
AMD / ATI 790gx is cool 64-128+ side port ram + sb750 + Hybrid Graphics with CrossFireX.
VIA quitting will push intel on board video down to dead last.
Some small company named BIM had this problem and I remember some other letters too, VLB , MCA. I could be a little dislicex today but I do seem to remember that BIM made a mess of that business when they tried to create a monopoly in the MCA. Perhaps Intel will make the same mistake as his father Lord Vader.
... cheap was the only thing they had going with their line.
i had a few problems with them back then when i assembled PCs.
The Real question is why Via doesn't just buy up AMD and solve this problem for themselves :)
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=amd&hl=en
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=TPE:2388
looks like VIA is in MUCH better shape than AMD at this time and they could strip the company for what works for them and resell what doesn't fit.
( while I like AMD as much as the next slashdotter they seem to be running themselves into the dirt these days)
There isn't one, because you're supposed to mod up good posts and mod down trolls and flamebait; stuff that is merely wrong is supposed to be left alone (or even modded up to make it and its correction more prominent, if it's a widely-held belief)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
By this logic, if AMD had quit processor business long time ago, we would never had 64 bit CPUs for under $100. Probably we wouldn't have CPUs under $100 at all.
P.S. I never really had problems with VIA chipsets. I have more problems now with my aging nForce4 mobo than I ever had with all Ali+Intel+VIA based mobos combined in past decade. Surprisingly, Ali was most stable to me - but was sold off due to compatibility with newer video cards. Intel's low-end was really low-end and was very very slow and feature-less. VIA delivered decent performance and nice feature set for fair price. nForce4 I have now has bunch of problems including support for 4GB RAM and SATA CD/DVD drives.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
(Score:-1, Barely functional retard that cannot punctuate or tell the difference between then and than)
It makes sense to exit this business. The future is clearly integration of more support functions onto the same part as the CPU. The support chipset is going the way of the separate FPU, the separate MMU, and the separate graphics controller. The future at the low end is one big part plus RAM.
Once of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to continue to exist in a market that has little to no return and not pull the plug before it's too late. I think this is a good thing for VIA. I applaud VIA's management for having the foresight to exit that market before it ate them alive, not to mention they can focus more on their x86 CPU market and work on perfecting their chipsets that work directly with their own CPUs.
Well the article states that via will quit the motherboard chipset business but that's not where they make more of their profits anyways, its in the embedded devices, and that market is growing, with the rise of more advanced cell phones (a potential product/market) will rise in that category eventually, but with the rise of ultra-portable and umpc, via's mini-itx design may help them design a suitable design for such computers. With the Via Nano, via has already shown that they are ready to "kick some ass" in that market. So in short, via's main business embedded devices is never going to go away so they are just getting rid of the dead "weight" on their business
God Of War ^^
This has been the case for me also. I've used several chipsets over the last few years. My last 3 main systems have been nvidia and I have 2 systems for other uses. One is a VIA and the other is a nforce3 chipset. The last 3 nvidia systems that have used for my main platform have had issues. Nothing that was big but where buggy as hell.
I'm currently using a AMD 790xx and I'm having no issues what so ever with. The VIA system I've had for 3 years and is running flawlessly. I've been using it for my bitch box so it has been abuses to no end. I bought the nforce3 system a few months after the VIA to use as a htpc. It has been nothing but trouble. I've had to reload it about every 6 to 8 months. It does it's job well but not as well as it should.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
The chipset business has gotten to the point that it is hard to turn a profit in that business. Especially when you need an R&D budget to stay competitive. I'm guessing VIA just does not have the margins to compete in the chipset business anymore, they probably were deciding if they should spin their next generation chipset and came to the conclusion to give up.
VIA claims that they believe the third-party chipset market will disappear, and they may be right. But I think their decision was based entirely on money rather than predictions.
SiS and VIA are both Taiwanese companies, so a merger would be possible. I don't see how SiS's chipset division can survive even in the short term. And VIA could probably use SiS's fabrication to produce system-on-chip embedded processors, although I highly doubt SiS is cutting edge enough to enable VIA to produce competitive desktop processors.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
VIA chipsets were for the most part solid but slow. The major exception being around the Aathlon XP or worse yet the MP where things were pretty much unusable.
At least with NForce chipsets you can have descent HD transfer and networking performance. My Nforce chipsets have been pretty much solid at least in Linux.
SiS on the other hand tended to be slow and unstable on any OS. That's why if I had a choice of what manufacturer would have quit the chipset buisness first it would have been SiS.
Actually, the software barrier to entry has proven much harder to overcome than the hardware one.
AMD went from obscurity to near dominance in some segments and part way back in a comparitively short time. It seems the X86 platform is just simpler to clone than the Windows/Office/IE-specific web platform.
Linux and OOo have made amazing strides, but are still not 'plug in replacements' in the way that AMD is for Intel.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
According to this info, the earlier /. story about Nvidia that was linked to in the summary was flat out wrong.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The demise of the third-party chipset market is bad news for consumers. I don't know why Intel and AMD are both doing all they can to sabotage their partners.
VIA is 2nd best of the chipset manufacturers and it will be a pity to see them go. It's tragic really, as VIA outperformed SiS (which is junk) and was a good alternative to intel.
So what do we have now for general boards?
Intel and SiS? NVIDIA are also pulling out I hear.
SiS is crap and I really don't want to work with those fragile, slow drivers.
That's bad news.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I agree with you. However, there an upside to this aswell. If only one compa isn is designing all the hardware, and just happen to be good hardare + 100% Linux friendly. For example; my intel based hardware runs Linux without any major issue. I must say I am not big fan of AMD. They sucks big time. At their peak they started charing more and more for their filthy CPU, and they campe up with Orwellian CPU numbers, and now became industry standarded. AMD & ATI sucks! Now that Chinese are making CPU, and I hopoing they will start selling them in western market -- I will buy it in a 2nd.
Even veals have more autonomy!
Personally I'm betting on an Intel/Nvidia merger. I'm sure that Intel doesn't like AMD having a market in graphics that Intel can't compete in,and now that Nvidia has a deal with Transmeta for the lower power tech that was used in Crusoe chips(and that Intel has a deal with too,I believe) Nvidia looks like it might be gearing up for a killing in the low power/mobile space. If the Tegra chips turn out to be good it could be a real score for Intel to either buy them out or make some kind of cross licensing deal now,before the Tegra launches. So IMHO we are going to end up with AMD/ATI,Intel/Nvidia,and Via will end up in the ultra low margin "Wal Mart" special section. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV. But I know I would personally love a low power affordable netbook with Nvidia graphics onboard.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Guess you never made it to one of their parties back in the eighties. >8^D
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
After dealing for YEARS with cheap-ass VIA chipsets which don't do DMA right (Sound cards, Tuner Cards, Video Capture, anything of high bandwidth) I can say HOORAY THEY'RE FINALLY QUITTING! Check out mythtv.org for their opinions on the via chipsets.
Via's whole weakness has been this bi-polar nature where their bread-and-butter was the chipsets that made them have to kiss ass to Intel to make sure they were privy to the proprietary data they needed to keep their chipsets compatible. That left their own CPUs and boards as the ugly step-daughter.
I remember when the Epias first came out here in Taiwan. You had to order them from England. There was no retail channel effort at all. I got really frustrated at this and went all over the island trying to get a local board and I slowly learned the story of Via's long-term mismanagement. For years it was owned by the daughter of a mega rich guy who had passed away and who really pissed away a lot of opportunities with clueless management. Their stock has been a local loser for years. The success of the MiniITX platform was nearly wasted due to this kind of problem so this is awesome news. Finally they're gonna go for it.
It's not just the boards. It's also about the PSUs and the other accessories that go along with these mini-PC platforms. This is a huge opportunity, but they've got to make it accessible. The prices certainly have to come down with the Atom platform and Nvidia's Tegra going coming in at well below a hudred bucks for boards that do 1080i and not so bad 3D, but Via can totally be a player in this new system-on-a-chip world order and unlike Nvidia they've got at least a record of trying to reach out to Linux users.
Oh and to Barry Lagina--
Competition is by no means an inherently good thing. In fact, that attitude that competition is a virtue embodies much of what is wrong with America today.
I frequently had driver issues with VIA's chipsets. (I've heard they've improved.)
Asus? Abit? Gigabyte? Intel, of course. Competition is good and I have enjoyed VIA's participation in the market indirectly. Even though I never bought a mobo with a VIA or nVidia chipset on it, they provided competition for Intel and helped to keep prices down.
This is bad news even for someone like me who wouldn't even think about buying a mobo with anything other than an Intel chipset on it. Intel gets to relax a little now. More and more it's getting that innovation no longer drives the mobo market. It's driven by who can get the best deal on cheap labor in China.
You know AMD have been making x86 chips since before the IBM PC was launched, right? It was a condition of IBM buying chips from Intel that they licensed their designs to a second source. AMD started selling slightly tweaked variants and then complete new designs around the time of the Pentium. Their 386 and 486 and Pentium offerings were often faster than anything Intel offered, and were pin-compatible, making them good drop-in upgrades once Intel had moved on to the next platform.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nuts, and they were practically the only hardware maker who hadn't joined the Trusted Computing Group. I had wondered whether it was an ideological choice or just them taking their time, but it looks like they were planning their exit.
SIS have always sucked. I'd be happy to see everyone pay a bit more and get decent quality hardware, especially when it's me that people call when their POS motherboard by SIS stops working.
Speak for yourself.
I owned an MSI KT133A-based motherboard with Athlon XP and it ran overclocked for 7 solid years until I decided I need to upgrade last year. Never had a single problem with it.
While there are better choices today, in its time VIA is definitely one of the best chipset makers.
There has been a lot of comments that one manufacturer would be bad. Yes, but only as long as the one is government(s) protected the world has shown many times that it just doesn't work for long - for the manufacturer. If it is a lucrative business and not protected by some stupid laws, someone invents a (perhaps) better way. At least until today every and each company having a "monopoly" has stagnated and taken over by competition as long as it hasn't been given privileges by local laws in which case it only takes longer. The public may be slow and very tolerant for a while but when they see what's happening behind the fence they want that also. And computers, if anything, are a world wide thing, see where the Asia is going. Some replies mentioned US car manufacturing, a good example even the government has tried to protect them many times, it just doesn't work. Look steel, paper, sugar, meat, cheese, whatever everyday products - more politics than real world and sooner or later people get tired of that when they realize how much the restrictions hurt them.
It's like becoming gay because you're not scoring enough hot chicks.
I've always liked VIA's chipsets. They have tended to value stability over performance, but that's fine. When I was building a home server, I wanted it to stay up for as long as I needed it to. I didn't care if file transfers of video transcodes took a couple of minutes longer.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
VIA broke the back of Intel's scheme to use their relative monopoly in processors to dominate the memory market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus
Licensing
As a company with no chip production facilities of its own, Rambus conducts business by filing patents and then licensing technologies. For example, Nintendo licensed Rambus memory for the Nintendo 64, as did Sony for use in the PlayStation 2. However, the most famous agreement was with Intel Corporation in 1996, under which Intel became obligated to use RDRAM as the primary memory technology for all Intel platforms until 2002.
In exchange for this, Intel was given a cut of Rambus's royalties, which Intel management anticipated would be a lucrative source of high margin revenue. In reality, the RDRAM standard did not prove to be popular, and motherboard manufacturers simply bought chipsets that supported SDRAM technology from VIA Technologies rather than more expensive RDRAM chipsets from Intel. Ironically in this manner, one of the most enduring achievements of Rambus was to facilitate the rise of VIA Technologies by creating a lucrative market vacuum.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
With the upcoming release of the Nehlam platform, we would imagine that this business should become far easier to be a part of, after all, it moves the majority of the complex tasks into the CPU and the chipset is more of a peripheral and power saving feature bus. But the truth is that in upcoming Intel chips it will be necessary to implement a far more complex DMA system and so far as I can tell from the FSB documents I've read (have the real ones) it looks like most of the existing code used for developing chipsets will have to be tossed.
These days, it's pretty obvious that Via won't make a living competing with AMD on sales of AMD chipsets, so there's just not point in bothering.
I appears that to support the Nehlam processor, an entirely new memory architecture will need to be developed to compensate for PCI DMA.
At the moment, from what I understand, if Via were to pursue licensing the Nehlam FSB, pursue implementing the new memory architecture, etc.. they would use a tremendous amount of financial resources that could otherwise be allocated to protecting their currently threatened CPU business. After all, almost every single VIA device on the market has be rereleased using Atom, even if it meant putting a square peg in a round hole.
Via should take whatever money they make from supporting the Intel and AMD platforms and sink it all into making the Via platform something special.
P.S. - In case VIA is reading this, I highly recommend making a VIA optimized compiler based on one of the high performance open source projects. This way companies dependant on CODEC performance could actually tweak their code for Via as well as AMD and Intel as we do now.
Oh yeah, it's really easy to design a great x86 processor.
All you have to do is spend millions of dollars recruiting the team that designed the most revered processor in the world, license the finest technologies from multiple companies, spend 20 years as a "second source" to acquire the rights to create x86 compatible parts(and fight constantly in court for years and years to retain those rights), and gamble your entire company on creating a competitor to the fastest x86 processor in the world, then after gaining some marketshare and mindshare, gamble your entire company on a dramatic new design idea.
Really easy.
(God you're stupid.)
It's been a long time.