Rumour control: VIA to stop making chipsets?

Posted at: 2:25am 10th September 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Vice president of VIA’s platform business to resign and take 40 VIA chipset technicians over to Asustek

The one-time king of enthusiast chipsets, VIA, could soon abandon its former staple business because of intense competition from Intel, Nvidia and AMD.

Last Friday, a report on DigiTimes suggested that the vice president of VIA’s platform business, Chewei Lin, planned to resign and take 40 VIA chipset technicians over to ASMedia, a subsidiary of Asustek. There appears to be some truth in the story too. An anonymous insider from VIA told Custom PC: ‘I would say the article is pretty accurate…our strategic focus has for quite a while been on our processor platforms rather than chipsets.’

VIA’s chipsets were often the first choice for users of AMD Athlon processors before Nvidia’s nForce 2 came out, but the Nvidia chipset’s faster performance and support for dual-channel RAM soon put VIA in the shade. VIA also had a legal run-in with Intel when it started producing unlicensed SDRAM-supporting chipsets for Intel’s original Pentium 4 processors, while Intel’s chipsets only supported RDRAM. Of course, AMD also owns its own chipset design team now in the form of ATi, and no longer needs VIA to develop reference chipsets.

Since then, VIA has had a tough time keeping up the in the chipset industry, with Nvidia’s nForce SLI chipsets taking over in the AMD arena, and Intel’s own chipsets dominating in the Intel arena. DigiTimes claims that ‘the future of VIA's chipset product line is uncertain,’ and it may well have a point. Now that VIA is focusing on its low-power motherboards with integrated CPUs, could this mean the end of VIA’s chipset business?