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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 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.
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.
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.
The only chip set I hated more than VIA was SIS.
SIS could out glitch VIA every time.
> 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
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.