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.

Comments

Many years ago ...

[overshoot]

The 486 hit the market and the only chipset support available was from 386 chipsets with kludged logic that covered the differences, notably in clock timing. This did not make Intel happy, since it resulted in processors coming off the line with no homes waiting for them.

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.

Re:too bad

[thealsir]

Complete opposite experience here. I admit I haven't used the old slot A KX1xx athlon chipsets KT133/A or the original KT266, but I've run several motherboards on the Apollo Pro 133, KT266A, KT333 and KT400, and haven't had any problems. I even ran several of them overclocked, on XP, 2000, and Linux. In fact, the machine I'm typing this on is a KT400 with 1GB RAM and a 2GHz Athlon XP running vista, with no stability issues whatsoever, it's a bit slow but I put a lot of load on it and there are server apps running in the background too.

The KT266A board that I had (Epox 8KHA+) was one of the fastest boards I ever owned, for its time. And it never had any problems, even overclocked.

I can understand that people have had issues with several VIA chipset revisions. But they were in many instances a lot better than the alternatives. They were much better than intel during the i820 fiasco and have always been somewhat better than AMD's native chipsets (until the K8 chipsets that is).

In fact, until nVidia came along with the nforce, they really were the only option for athlons. I'll admit that the nForce/2 offered some stiff competition and was good, and that nVidia eventually did usurp via with the nForce3 Ultra and beyond.

You speak as someone who has limited anecdotal experience with a few via chipsets. Well, here I'm offering mine, with a few facts to back it up, as well as the experiences and opinions of many I've met over the years.

VIA definitely played an important role in the game. For one, they were partially responsible for the Athlon's ascendancy. And second, they provided competition for Intel's chipsets when those were lacking. It is sad to see them exit the business.