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

Tough business? Not as tough as you think...

[Richard_at_work]

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...

Maybe a brilliant move

[blind biker]

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.

Re:too bad

[TheRaven64]

There is still competition, but the market has moved. People aren't buying a motherboard and a processor anymore, they're buying a platform. It used to be that motherboard manufacturers would get north and south bridge chips from different suppliers and combine them, then add a CPU and have a full package. Gradually the north and south bridges got combined (and AMD moved some parts of the north bridge chip into the CPU). In the embedded market, it's common to have all of these components in a single chip (and often a GPU and DSP or two too), and this is the direction the laptop market seems to be heading in too.

They are getting out of this market, because it's not going to exist for much longer.

Re:too bad

[ATMD]

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?

Re:Godfuckdamn

[bestinshow]

"lapped" ... it's about 20% faster clock for clock, and the top clocks are about 20% higher, so that's about 44% faster at the most, and certainly not if you start scaling to multiple CPUs where AMD is still leading (check out the 4P 16C benchmarks for AMD against Intel).

AMD now have an in-house chipset maker who are making some very well received and functional chipsets (AMD 790GX for example), have improved Linux support incredibly (Day 1 Linux Support for HD4000 series graphics cards, drivers were on the shipped CD).

I think you are seeing the natural integration difficulties in 2007 and this year as a long-term issue, whereas it is clearly a short-term issue. Barcelona was flawed even before the acquisition, R600 was an underperformer before it as well. RV770 and the fixed Phenoms are good options now, and there are good vibes for the coming year as well.

Re:Goodbye VIA

[Alereon]

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.