Another Scandal: Intel vs Via

Recent news stated that Via will stop using Intel's front side bus architecture beginning May 2006 and will manufacture products based only on their self designed front side bus. Via officials stated that they needed to change the front side bus architecture because they needed more performance. An agreement between Intel and Via to use compatible FSBs only by the end of March 2006 was mentioned as well.

Taiwanese media said, counterparting the official statements, that Intel and Via didn't have a friendly break up. Sources claim that actually Intel terminated the agreement. The fight between the two companies began when Via started earning money out of embedded CPUs during 2005, although the companies made a deal several years ago. Intel's officials saw the revenues and weren't too happy that Via earned more money from the embedded components industry than their own company.

The front side bus is a vital part in transferring data from the CPU to other components of the computer. Via launched its own front side bus design, running at a 800MHz clock speed, called V4-Bus. Intel's older front side bus was running at only 133 MHz. To make it short, the faster the front side bus is, the faster the computer applications are.