VIA Merges Chipset Division Under CPU

[HardOCP News]

The Chinese-language Apply Daily newspaper is reporting that VIA has plans to merge its chipset and CPU divisions to focus on the company's own-brand CPU platforms. According to the report, VIA will still support its older AMD and Intel platforms as it moves forward.

VIA Technologies merged its PC chipset division under that of CPUs in the fourth quarter of last year. Going forward the division will mainly focus on supporting the company's own-brand CPU platforms and will slowly phase out of the third-party chipset market, according a Chinese-language Apply Daily report citing sources at the company.

 

[Exavior]

Will enough people actually leave Intel or AMD to go to a VIA cpu that they will be able to continue to make money by only making chipsets for their own cpu? Its not like their chipset alone will draw people to their cpus.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

 

[bob]

Will enough people actually leave Intel or AMD to go to a VIA cpu that they will be able to continue to make money by only making chipsets for their own cpu? Its not like their chipset alone will draw people to their cpus.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Since when did Via make a cpu that competes with an intel, or amd cpu? Sure, AMD has the geode... and Intel has smaller versions of their mainstream stuff (which really none are low power/embedded), but nothing like what via has.

 

[SmokeRngs]

VIA is going after a completely different market than Intel, AMD or nVidia overall. I know nVidia does not make CPUs but they do make chipsets for AMD and Intel.

I see this as nothing more than a way to integrate the CPU and chipsets for the C3 or whatever processor they are working on right now (I have nothing against those processors, it's just been ages since I've followed them) for embedded systems and things such as that.

VIA chipsets haven't been exactly selling like hotcakes for Intel or AMD platforms for a while now and it's probably a losing business for them. With AMD having their own platform like Intel now it's also another nail in VIA's coffin in regards to chipsets for the performance processors.

VIA may remain x86 instruction set compatible like their products are now; they just won't be making chipsets for AMD or Intel and concentrate on their own platform.

Overall, this isn't really that surprising to me. Previously VIA made their money on chipsets by supporting things that Intel didn't (PC133 SDRAM and dual socket capable motherboards for P3s) and AMD didn't (most of the "performance" chipsets back in the K7 and early K8 days). VIA no longer has anything to compete with in terms of Intel, AMD and nVidia chipsets so their marketshare is practically nil or shrinking to that point.