14 DAY TRIAL // Via Technologies is a computer hardware company known for its low performance, low power and low price products that can usually be found in entry level computer systems or in embedded systems where a low power drain coupled with a low manufacturing and selling price is more important than raw computing power.
As the company struggles to maintain its market competitiveness with some very low power processors like the Eden ULV, on the chipset market VIA is hopelessly outperformed by solutions made by companies like Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and Nvidia. According to the news site xbitlabs the company's situation is made even more difficult as a number of engineers together with a vice president from the chipset business presented their resignations and declared that they are heading toward the greener pastures of an Asustek Computer's subsidiary, ASMedia Technology. Apart from the falling chipset business VIA is not doing so great on the central processing units' market either as their solutions are now integrated only in handful of computer systems and that while its graphics division, S3, is encountering problems as their graphics processing units are several generations behind the ones made by AMD/ ATI and Nvidia.
According to information posted on the company's website, VIA currently employs around 1400 engineers and while 40 engineers may not seem like much, considering that the chipset division has yet to sign the agreement with Intel concerning the development of chipsets for the next generation of quad core and dual core Intel processors, the leave of the key core logic specialized employees may hit the company exactly where it hurts the most.
While it was reported sometime ago that VIA may completely cease the development of chipsets for other platforms and focus entirely on its own low power C7 processor platform in order to gain a stronger foothold on the embedded systems' market like multimedia control systems and thin clients, industrial PCs and point of sale terminals as well as ultra-mobile devices and car electronics, the group resignation, which is denied by the company may pose a number of problems even in that scenario.