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

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?