14 DAY TRIAL // There are over two years since VIA Technologies released its latest third-party chipset on the market, but the story seems to have caught a lot of attention lately from the media. And things have gone a little too far on a number of news sites, as there were some articles saying that Via had quit the chipset market business for good. Reacting to these rumors, Richard Brown, VIA's vice president on marketing, stated on a blog post that his words had been misunderstood.
As we reported yesterday, Via indeed exited the third-party chipset business, but it did so in order to concentrate on the development and manufacturing of its own platforms and micro-processors. "I am stunned at the reaction to my comments in the Custom PC article. I thought this was an old story," said Richard Brown. "We haven't been shipping chipsets for Intel processors for a while now, and are only shipping a limited volume of chipsets for AMD chipsets," he added. "This comprises only a very small proportion of our total business. Our processor business makes up the vast majority of our revenues."
In April 2006, Via announced the PT890, the latest third-party chipset released by the company. The platform was designed for the Intel Pentium 4 and Core 2 Duo processors and featured a 1,066MHz front-side bus. The latest chipset designed for an AMD processor was the K8T890, unveiled by Via in September 2004, and came with support for Athlon 64, Sempron and Opteron processors. The list of third-party chipsets is still online, but has the following note attached to it: "VIA no longer sells some or all of these chipsets".
September 2007 revealed to the world the decline of VIA's third-party chipset business. At that time, Chewei Lin, formerly a vice president and general manager of the company's platform group, left and joined ASMedia Technology, a firm which designs chips for MP3 players and flat-screen TVs. About 40 engineers left Via along with him to work at ASMedia.
There were other factors that influenced VIA's departure from the third-party chipset business. One of them is considered to be Intel's actions towards strengthening its control over the chipsets developed for its processors, along with some changes in the way processors are designed. AMD has already included a memory controller in its processors, and Intel will do so with its next generation Nehalem chips that are due for the fourth quarter of the year. Not long ago, the chipset was responsible for handling the memory controller and for input/output functions.
The bottom line of Via's actions is that the company is focused on developing chipsets that support its own C7 and Nano processors. "To set the record straight, while we are no longer making chipsets for CPUs from other vendors, we are continuing to develop new chipsets for the VIA C7 and VIA Nano processors. In addition, despite what some reports have said, we have not exited the motherboard business and will continue to produce motherboards featuring VIA chipsets and processors," Brown said on the blog post we've mentioned.