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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.
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...
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.
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.
"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.