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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.
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.
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
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.
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...
Or to (hard)ware.
Death to the floppy!
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist...)
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 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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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
I have one older PC that had this sort of problem - until a driver update that brought a workaround.
AFAIK the VIA chipset had a fundamental flaw in the first place (data loss on the PCI bus under high load) but such flaws happen to other vendors too and a workaround in the driver is usually acceptable. In this case, the problem showed up in the field and VIA only fixed it after getting bad publicity.
C - the footgun of programming languages
...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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> 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
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.
From hell's heart I stab at thee!
/w Intel chip and Intel video card - add a VIA USB card and POOF! There goes your stability. All I can hope for is that they go completely out of business and perhaps have a few higher-ups in the company spontaneously combust.
I hate VIA if you didn't gather that already. I've spent more time puzzling over ACPI, bus mastering, faulty IRQ sharing, piss poor drivers that VIA has made than all other OEM's put together. Even if you have a fully functional Intel chipset board
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
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Although VIA will still be developing chipsets for integrated motherboards featuring the Nano CPU, but will no longer produce chipsets for Intel and AMD CPUs.
Although this contradicts the headline directly, but it is also gramatically incorrect.
AMD are making chipsets (having consumed ATI who were making them before), haven't you read the reviews? Look at the AMD 790GX chipset, or the 780G ...
Some small company named BIM had this problem and I remember some other letters too, VLB , MCA. I could be a little dislicex today but I do seem to remember that BIM made a mess of that business when they tried to create a monopoly in the MCA. Perhaps Intel will make the same mistake as his father Lord Vader.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well, just looking at market capitalization: VIA == $25.26 Billion New Taiwan Dollars == $810 Million US Dollars AMD == $3.13 Billion US Dollars I think it would be quite challenging for VIA to buy AMD. Even less likely, given that there is typically a premium required for a buyout.
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.