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VIA Quits Motherboard Chipset Business

Posted by timothy on from the sea-change dept.

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.

6 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. too bad by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Insightful

    competition is a good thing.

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    1. Re:too bad by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:too bad by ATMD · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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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  2. Seems like the right choice by bestinshow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Goodbye VIA by bloodninja · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    That's just the thing: they seems to have the resources for competing in only one of the markets. They choose the market that will offer them the most freedom of innovation. Additionally, it is a much more visible market, arguably a more critical market, and a market that is expanding faster than Intel and AMD can keep up (at least for small, handheld devices). Better to have the #3 slice of a huge pie than the #1 slice of a smaller pie.

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  4. Where does this leave SiS? by UserChrisCanter4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.