VIA has tacitly confirmed that it's quitting the PC chipset business, claiming that there's no longer a third-party chipset market worth the name. Richard Brown, VIA's marketing chief, told Custom PC: "We believed that ultimately the third-party chipset market would disappear... That has indeed come to pass."VIA's perspective is that with Intel producing almost all the chipsets used with Intel processors, and with AMD increasingly the prime supplier of system logic for its own processors, there's a rapidly narrowing space for third-party chipset makers. In VIA's case, it appears it has decided the gap is now too narrow, and it's getting out. At the very least, it saves it having to go to the expense of licensing Intel's new QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) bus, set to debut with the giant's 'Nehalem' CPUs.
View: The full story @ The Reg
Start the celebrations!!!
VIA's been waiting to die for years IMO.
Basically, once the nForce2 came out, they seemed to lose something. The KT333/400/600/800 were okay chipsets, but it's like once they lost the brass ring, they couldn't ever grasp it again.
After K8, they gave up entirely. K8T800 was passable, but only because nForce3 wasn't hugely impressive. K8T890 had no footing against nF4, and at that point, people stopped caring.
On the Intel side, their continued existence primarily seemed to be due to ASRock's continued ability to shoehorn newer and newer CPUs onto the PT880 chipset.
I think SiS's prospects might actually be a touch rosier, because they seemed to at least refresh their products with a bit more regularity (they may still suck, but at least it's new suck), and they're in a far stronger "do or die" position. VIA's CPU business is almost strong enough (because of its niche market successes) to sustain a small chipset business, but SiS can't just take that way out.
I have used VIA chipset for years with zero problems so the question would be have you really used any. And yes I know there was a problem with some version of VIA chipset a few years ago that had a problem with hard drive corruption but that has been fixed for quite some time.
I have used VIA chipset for years with zero problems so the question would be have you really used any. And yes I know there was a problem with some version of VIA chipset a few years ago that had a problem with hard drive corruption but that has been fixed for quite some time.
Same here. Never have had an issue with Via chipsets, except for a new machine that had Linux gOS pre-installed and was kind of a bear getting drivers for when I wiped that off and installed XP Pro. Even at that, all that was required was a little extra patience in digging up the correct drivers for everything.
Never any real reason to celebrate seeing some company go bust though.
I have used VIA chipset for years with zero problems so the question would be have you really used any. And yes I know there was a problem with some version of VIA chipset a few years ago that had a problem with hard drive corruption but that has been fixed for quite some time.
Same here. Never have had an issue with Via chipsets, except for a new machine that had Linux gOS pre-installed and was kind of a bear getting drivers for when I wiped that off and installed XP Pro. Even at that, all that was required was a little extra patience in digging up the correct drivers for everything.
Never any real reason to celebrate seeing some company go bust though.
They're not going bust, they're just not making chipsets anymore.
Best news in a while
/champagne!
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