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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.
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
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...
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.
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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
They are getting out of this market, because it's not going to exist for much longer.
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...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.
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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.
I agree - abandoning their bread and butter product is not wise. At the same time, good riddance - I never had good luck with non-Intel (or non-AMD) chipsets being stable.
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?
In this case, you have 3 companies making binary compatible "platforms". This is direct competition with the added benefit of less hardware quirks and incompatibilities from trying to support everyone else. This is the very reason why Apple is hesitant to vary their hardware.
If you fear one will dominate than the others, Intel won that fight with it's partner Microsoft in the 90s.
I think my only question in this is where nVidia will fit in? All three companies (AMD/Intel/VIA) make their own integrated everything at this point, including video accelerators. These meet or exceed most people's needs except the die hard gamers. But if most people get what they need out of the box, why would they even consider a video card upgrade? Why would they (or a vendor) buy a motherboard with an outsider chipset?
I use a VIA C3 intgerated system as a file server, the only thing I had to stick in it was the RAM and hard drive. My next desktop upgrade will probably be an AMD "Spider". I like this direction.
Definitely. I also fear a world with two dominant processor manufacturers who make the whole motherboard. Maybe that's too much fear...
If cpu makers make the who shebang then expect development to slow to the same rate as development in the auto industry.
more of the same on Twitter.
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
It's not just competition, and Via hasn't been a big player in years.
Via hasn't had good penetration in the Intel market since the Apollo Pro 133 days. The P4 era all but locked them out.
Via did pretty well (and at times, utterly dominated) in the AMD market until nForce4 came along--while it was common knowledge that nForce4 was horribly buggy, nVidia had better name recognition, was first to market with PCI-E, and had SLI. But Via managed to stay afloat despite this; they had a distinct budget niche. This wasn't the end, and Via would still be in the chipset business if that was the worst of it.
The end came when AMD's acquisition of ATI put Via in the same position they were in with Intel. To be fair, nVidia got stabbed in the back the same way. Both Via and nVidia had their turn as the de facto standard AMD chipset manufacturer, and the switch between them happened natrually; AMD buying ATI took it away from both of them by force. AMD's betrayal of their third-party chipset makers was galling. Not only is Via quitting, but there are rumors of nVidia doing the same thing.
AMD and Intel are fast becoming the only chipset makers in the market. AMD ate ATI, nVidia assassinated ULi just as they were making a comeback, Via is pulling out, and nVidia might be pulling out too. That leaves SiS as the lone third party.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Average Joe doesn't buy a video card upgrade anyway, so nvidia's market there shouldn't be too badly affected. Of course, if AMD/ATi decide to introduce incompatibilities into their chipset that make it hard for other video cards to work, that's another matter. Also don't nvidia do integrated graphics? They might have a problem there.
Perhaps we'll see nvidia entering the CPU business some time soon... Maybe they'll be the new AMD, who knows?
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How about "in addition"?
My point is that the deeper the integration goes the less chance there is for real competition. If each CPU maker does their own chipsets, audio and video then eventually there'll be no room for substantive distinction between motherboards and those manufacturers will either disappear or just produce a bunch of exact implementations of a reference design from the CPU makers.
After that the rate of innovation will flatten out and we'll settle into a yearly cycle of rehashing the same ideas year after year driven just by marketing glitz (which is where my auto industry reference came from).
Whether VIA will be a dominant cpu maker doesn't make a big difference in that outcome (though it is important in a different discussion). It's the depth of integration in the market that i'm concerned about here.
more of the same on Twitter.
I fear a world with one dominant processor manufacturer
Welcome to 2006.
Providing (almost) NVidia-like video card performance combined with (almost) Intel-like openness is one great thing AMD is doing right now. It's too bad that not enough pepole care about the openness to make it matter.
The end came when AMD's acquisition of ATI put Via in the same position they were in with Intel. To be fair, nVidia got stabbed in the back the same way. Both Via and nVidia had their turn as the de facto standard AMD chipset manufacturer, and the switch between them happened natrually; AMD buying ATI took it away from both of them by force. AMD's betrayal of their third-party chipset makers was galling. Not only is Via quitting, but there are rumors of nVidia doing the same thing.
AMD didn't betray anyone. Via hasn't released a chipset with any innovative features in years, the only reason they had any products were to cover the legacy (AGP) and low-end markets. Their changing market focus has been obvious. nVidia has released a number of products with very high-profile defects, such as chipsets with severe data corruption bugs, and GPUs that fail prematurely due to packaging issues. nVidia chose to gamble that keeping SLI proprietary wouldn't piss Intel off enough to deny them a Nehalem bus license, and they lost. nVidia makes chipsets for extreme gamers who want SLI, and those consumers will buy Nehalem platforms because they are the fastest. If all nVidia has left is the AMD market, they really have no reason to keep making chipsets. The fact that their chipsets have a reputation for running hot and having issues doesn't really help at all.
"Perhaps we'll see nvidia entering the CPU business some time soon... "
Nvidia *IS* in the CPU business. We call their products GPUs, and we try to limit their use to display adapters, but GPUs are really slightly specialized CPUs. Go on, split the hairs, but it's way more true than false. There is even clustering and app s/w for GPUs.
Not at all a shocker if Nvidia starts marketing a specialized 'C'PU. Something either low power, graphics-enhanced or graphics-embedded, or maybe a one-chip solution. Not that far out of their core competency, though uptake will be harder without a track record.
But Nvidia was not, to me, a mainstream winner in m/b chipsets. SiS has had some good sets, and of course Intel has to be able to make a competitive chipset if for no other reason than to be able to demonstrate their CPUs, ditto AMD.
Perhaps Nvidia is spread a little thin? Now their threat may be that of the one-trick pony. Going into a specialized CPU business may make more sense. They have the GPU->CPU smarts, I bet. Add the chipset knowledge and you get a one-chip ability fairly quickly. Now to find a market. Oh. Sub-notebooks. Or maxi-PDA, or whatever is between an iPhone and a minitablet.
Competition? If only.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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)
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.
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I forgot, there are AMD made chips for Intel CPUs, but I don't know if there are plans for new chips, or if they are ATi legacy.
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NVidia stumbles in the chipset arena because they just have too god-damn many of them. The process goes like this:
Q. How many video cards do you want to SLI ?
A. 0 -> get a 610/630 board
1 -> get a 650 or 750
2 -> get a 650 Ultra or 680
3 -> get a 780 or 790
Beyond the SLI madness, they all support the same processors - at least on the Intel side, I'm not up to date on AMD. I realize the "need" for segmentation, but that inevitably leads to much duplication of work in maintaining all these similar yet distinct chipsets, when a single master chipset could handle them all. This would possibly leads to better prices as well, as most nForce boards cost between $150 and $300, except for the low-end 610i. Considering they're almost guaranteed one or two NVidia GPU sales, the price is a bit gougey..
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Okay, so PC Hardware is never broken? Cheap-ass power supplies that don't actually deliver 12V, caps with bad fluid, or shoddy connectors don't happen? I mean, at a basic point, you're essentially asserting that PC hardware doesn't break. Clearly, because Linux, FreeBSD, etc. are capable of running on "any system," even one where voltage levels are below the required specs or PCI buses don't actually work according to spec.
There are three levels to flawed hardware. One is the "fundamental flaws," and you're right, they're not as common as some would have you believe. I can only think of a few off the top of my head: Via had an issue with PCI buses on their systems that basically dropped data when under heavy load. ALi had a problem with early AGP implementations where the voltage was actually well below the maximum required by the AGP spec, thereby causing crashes with some video cards. I've seen mainboards where USB sound "cards" were drawing power on the same bus that was supposed to be connected to front USB ports - if more than two bus-powered devices were connected, the sound card didn't work correctly. That strikes me as a fundamental flaw, although admittedly one caused by the mainboard manufacturer and not the chipset manufacturer. I'm surprised that given the number of design flaws in any field you believe that the PC mainboard industry is exempt from this issue.
The second level to flawed hardware is the driver problems. You've got new systems running older versions of Linux. Congrats. I'd first wonder if you were trying to use anything more advanced than network support on those systems, but I'll leave that for another discussion. Can I recompile the kernel with whatever slap-dash, shoddy binary blob driver I want and expect your systems to run correctly? That's the problem Via continually plagued the world with on its chipsets - I don't doubt that most of them, hardware-wise, were as decent as any other randomly selected chipset. Their drivers were simply awful, though. If you caught them a year and a half after release, yeah, they were probably okay. When you first got a KTxxx, you could end up with something that worked fine or you could end up cursing the day you were born. You don't need OS-level workaround to fix a problem, just a halfway decent driver. On-board sound drivers: garbage. Conflicts with sound cards: guaranteed. Issues when PCI slots four or five were filled: common. None of them were likely hardware-level problems, but they were just as bad. At a certain level, they were fundamental flaws in that chipset drivers are as much a part of the system as the chipset itself. I wouldn't buy Via stuff at all after NVidia filled the hole in the AMD market (and Intel always had pretty solid stuff), but it doesn't mean I didn't have to troubleshoot it for others. If you've got older versions of Slack that aren't attempting to use ATA-133 (or hell, ATA-33 at that age), sound at any level other than SB emulation, or USB anything, I'm not surprised you aren't seeing problems (note: I'm assuming here that you're using whatever version of the kernel shipped with Slack 3.3). Those of us who bought or worked on Via boards and tried to use such features, though, were greeted with the Sisyphean task of hoping that Via's latest 4in1 driver would fix whatever bizarre problem they'd introduced last month.
The final level to flawed hardware is the cheap components used by manufacturers who sourced Via or Sis or ALi chipsets. It did no good to save a couple of bucks on the chipset if you didn't slash costs elsewhere to compensate. You ended up with sub-par equipment all around. Perhaps Via products would have a better rep if they weren't constantly relegated to the $60 mainboard (although the early days of the Athlon and the boards from quality manufacturers say otherwise). As it was, though, cheap chipsets went hand-in-hand with lousy mainboard build quality and quality control. Not Via's fault, necessarily, but it wasn't making me any happier with their product.
I'd close by asking what Windows update is for if Microsoft refuses to acknowledge Windows has any bugs, ever.
Well I can add my 02c that working in a repair shop we had more trouble with Via chipsets than any other. You would always get these weird errors and data corruption. That is why we always went SiS for our budget boxes. Never had a bit of trouble out of the SiS boards. Once in a while we would get buggy Intel or Ati boards,but Via was more miss than hit,at least when I worked there. I wouldn't know about now as the SiS boards were usually a few bucks cheaper and ran more stable so I never bothered to go back. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV. And I personally hope Via does good,simply for the competition. Plus they always seemed to do things a little different on their CPUs than the other guys,like the built in hardware crypto.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.