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Hardware VIA Leaves Chipset Business
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - August 11, 2008 4:07 PM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 51 comment(s) - last by mindless1.. on Aug 13 at 1:22 AM
VIA says there is no longer a place for third party chipset makers

For a long time there have been several manufacturers in the chipset business and the largest of them were Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, VIA, and SiS. VIA today announced that it will be leaving the motherboard chipset business, ceding the market to its competitors.

Custom PC reports that VIA insiders said the company no longer sees a market for third-party chipset makers. VIA's Richard Brown told Custom PC, "One of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately, the third party chipset market would disappear, and we would need to have the capability to provide a complete platform. That has indeed come to pass."

Brown says that Intel now provides the majority of chipsets for its processors and AMD is quickly going the same route. Rumors sprang up that VIA was leaving the chipset market at the end of 2007. At the time it was rumored that a former VIA general manager, Chewei Lin, had plans to resign and take 40 VIA chipset technicians with him to ASMedia.

VIA isn't the only long time chipset maker that has seen rumors if it leaving the chipset business surface. While VIA has confirmed that it will be leaving the chipset market, NVIDIA says it is not leaving the chipset market. Rumors circulated at the beginning of August 2008 that NVIDIA would be leaving the chipset business. NVIDIA's Brian Burke quickly quashed those rumors when he contacted DailyTech to say NVIDIA's chipset business was stronger than ever on the back of the new 790i chipset.

Leaving the chipset business should give VIA more resources to commit to its CPU efforts. VIA recently announced its 65nm Nano Processor that it intends to battle directly with Intel's Atom processor.

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VIA made damn good chipsets
By sgw2n5 on 8/11/2008 5:41:21 PM , Rating: 2
One of my old gaming rigs was an Athlon64 3400+ on a VIA K8T800. You couldn't break the thing if you tried. I believe my dad is still chugging along on that PC just fine, and this is after a PSU literally blew up during operation. Just replaced the PSU and it booted right up.




RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By Locutus465 on 8/11/2008 5:45:33 PM , Rating: 4
Wow... This hardly reflects my feeling towards via... Though my last Via experience was with the original Socket A chipset. But yeah, in my experience Via was one of the biggest factors both keeping AMD running in the early days, but also holding them back from reaching their full potential.

It wasn't until nVidia came on the sceen that AMD's chipset woe's were finally resolved... Now with the ATI purchase the platform is extreamly strong (though yes, needs some work on the CPU front now).

I for one don't really miss via all that much... I switched to nVidia with my Althon 64, kepted with nVidia for my x2 and I'm not on a 100% AMD platform... Life has been great since I ditched with my socket A platform.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By Operandi on 8/11/2008 6:21:26 PM , Rating: 5
I have to say nearly all my experience with VIA has been positive. To this day all the socket A VIA machines (a dozen at least) that I built for clients are still running. Some of the small business machines running 24/7 since 2001.

Actually I just built a HTPC from an old AXP 2800+ with Vista Ultimate with a VIA board form ebay. When upgraded to 2GB of RAM It runs surprisingly well considering the era it came from.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By StevoLincolnite on 8/11/2008 8:39:10 PM , Rating: 2
I have to agree, I have had minimal issues with Via.

I had an AMD K6-2 as my first AMD Platform which was originally on the Socket 7, AGP issues were everywhere, but it didn't bother me as at the time I had SLI Voodoo 2 12mb PCI cards.

Then I went with the Via Apollo on the Socket 370 paired with a Pentium 3 667 and an ATI Rage Furry MAXX (ATi's first Dual GPU solution) without an issue, it was probably better Price/Performance/features than the comparable Intel Chipset at the same price, considering it was able to use more than 256mb of PC133 SDRAM memory.

I kept the same machine because it was solid for many years eventually dropping in a Geforce FX 5700LE and doubled the core clockspeed to play games like FarCry. (Doom 3 was simply un-playable).
I then gave the machine to a friend and it's still humming along fine even after nearly 8 years.

Then I grabbed a Thunderbird @ 1.4ghz with the Via Apollo KT266 chipset, was rock solid and never even blinked, machine still hums along fine as my storage box.

Then I upgraded to an Athlon XP 3200+ with an nForce 2 chipset, wasn't the best experience, the system only lasted for a few months till the Power supply unit Blew and took the motherboard with it, then on the next board all my IDE devices to function and Audio kept crackling after about 6 months after I got it, I managed to grab another nForce 2 board and I keep the machine in the spare room, hasn't had a problem since, but then again it rarely gets used.

Now, I have an Intel box with a Pentium 2160 @ 3ghz and Crossfire Radeon 4850's on an Intel iP45 chipset.

I did have a Celeron 2.4ghz somewhere in there with an SiS Chipset, never had an issue with it, but it was severly lacking in the features department though.

Anyway, I'm thankful Via Made chipsets for the AMD platform, without them the Venerable K6-2 and K6-3, Early Athlons would probably be a more horrible platform choice than it would have.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By gerf on 8/11/2008 10:17:20 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Then I grabbed a Thunderbird @ 1.4ghz with the Via Apollo KT266 chipset, was rock solid and never even blinked, machine still hums along fine as my storage box.
You do realize that chip is the hottest chips ever? I'd suggest finding something else if you're running it 24/7. I had a 900MHz Thunderbird on a ECS K7VZA 1.x (VIA chipset), and it runs solidly still, but just so damn hot.


By StevoLincolnite on 8/12/2008 12:03:54 AM , Rating: 2
Yeah I do know that, But then again I do have a Thermalright SI-97 heatpipe cooler and hi flow fan, so I don't think heat will be an issue.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By KernD on 8/12/2008 12:08:12 AM , Rating: 2
No the hottest chip ever is the P4 Dual Core extreme edition 3.2 ghz, unless they made a 3.4 ghz?

This processor will shut itself down if you make it work 4 threads at 100% for a few minutes.

There is one of the reason why they never ramped to 4 or 5 ghz and Intel switched to a more energy efficient design.

Most people don't realize that because in those days no commonly used app ran 4 threads that intensively for this long.


By StevoLincolnite on 8/12/2008 2:34:17 AM , Rating: 2
Or the 3.78ghz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition using the Presshott Architecture?

Anyway, it doesn't really matter in the end, if the machine works for me for this many years heat out-put can't be much of an issue.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By HotdogIT on 8/12/2008 9:29:22 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
This processor will shut itself down if you make it work 4 threads at 100% for a few minutes.


Without a heatsink, sure. In a normal case with a normal, stock heatsink, it'll be fine.

Back when the Pentium Ds dropped to stupidly cheap prices on Ebay, I had several of the EEs running FaH SMP client. They ran hot and loud, but never shut themselves down.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By Oregonian2 on 8/11/2008 6:50:19 PM , Rating: 2
VIA AMD-processor ones I've had were buggy and <expletive>. That said, it's been a while since I had one (because of that experience) so I can't say how they're doing now (as well as switching to Conroe processor and Intel chipset after a few generations of nVidia AMD chipsets). So although not based upon current Via Chipsets, my opinion is that I'm glad they're out.

Perhaps anecdotal evidence such as mine above will be wildly varied about VIA chipsets. I'd be more curious as to whether they were big in Dell, Leveno, HP, etc machines over a long time because they'd be sensitive to chipset bugs and not want to spend money for field-supporting bad parts (and therefore probably not use them very long).


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By Operandi on 8/11/2008 7:10:23 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
I'd be more curious as to whether they were big in Dell, Leveno, HP, etc machines over a long time because they'd be sensitive to chipset bugs and not want to spend money for field-supporting bad parts (and therefore probably not use them very long).


I think VIA did pretty well with OEMs, not sure about actual market %'s but I know HP/Compaq used VIA quite a bit.

Just like the motherboard market most of the higher-end Intel machines went with Intel chipsets and most of the high AMD machines used the nForce.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By MonkeyPaw on 8/11/2008 6:05:03 PM , Rating: 3
Yeah, Via was a good chipset choice at stock speeds, but the company realized way too late that OCers want lockable PCI, AGP, and PCIe buses. Via really did help get the K8 rolling--they just got run over by NF3's better options.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By Integral9 on 8/12/2008 12:16:32 PM , Rating: 3
I dissagree. VIA produced very good chipsets for overclockers and were the only chipset to overclock with durring the P3 era and well into the P4 era as Intel's chipsets wouldn't allow it. It wasn't until the CPU makers started locking the multipliers, voltage and FSB that VIA began to loose steam in the OC market.

eg: Using a VIA KT133A chipset, I overclocked a Coppermine Celeron 533A to 800MHz by jumping the bus up to 100MHz from 66MHz.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=1264


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By Slaimus on 8/11/2008 7:42:09 PM , Rating: 3
My only experience with VIA chipsets for AMD was pretty bad. I have a Iwill KK266 with the KT133A chipset. The board seemed very stable, but then I noticed the effects of the IDE corruption problems. I tried many different drivers from VIA that claim to fix the issue, but none of them did. There was a point where I did not even attempt to copy any large files between hard drives, since it always seem to result in a corrupt file.

The only one that ended up working for me was a PCI latency patch driver from breese. However, that driver did not work with WinXP SP1, so that machine is still running Win2k.


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By jonmcc33 on 8/11/2008 9:36:56 PM , Rating: 2
Who was it that stated that Apple would start using VIA chipsets? LOL!


RE: VIA made damn good chipsets
By djc208 on 8/12/2008 6:44:50 AM , Rating: 2
While they might not have been the big contender at least they offered some unique products. They're PT880 Pro/ultra ASRock boards with AGP & PCIe and DDR & DDR2 slots is a great product.

Kept me from having to upgrade CPU/MB/memory/GPU all at the same time, runs well, and has been very stable with everything I've put in it. I doubt you'll see such unique products with them gone.


Smart Move
By Cygni on 8/11/2008 4:23:49 PM , Rating: 2
I have to say, this is a smart move on VIA's part and they are absolutly right. The time of third party chipset builders is likely drawing to a close sooner rather than later. AMD/Intel are the ones who push the future specs, they are the ones who design the CPUs, and they both have huge chipset divisions.

Its safe to say that their wont be a place for guys like SiS, Uli, and VIA in the future... although Nvidia may be able to continue carving out a small space.




RE: Smart Move
By TomZ on 8/11/2008 4:36:54 PM , Rating: 1
I don't see why nVIDIA would face any different business situation compared to their competitors. They probably have the strongest offering, so maybe they will just be the last to throw in the towel.

On a related subject, will there be a day when the chipset will be integrated on-chip with the CPU? Is there some reason this isn't done already?


RE: Smart Move
By rudolphna on 8/11/2008 11:22:50 PM , Rating: 2
that is whats supposed to happen with AMDs next generation of processors.


RE: Smart Move
By FITCamaro on 8/11/2008 4:38:41 PM , Rating: 2
Nvidia keeps on releasing the large, hot, bloated chipsets its been putting out for the past few years, and they'll be gone in a matter of time too. Now that Intel has SLI licensed, I forsee their sales going way down. Nvidia doesn't make bad graphics cards, but their chipsets leave something to be desired. I'm running a 680i board myself and while it works ok, I only got it because you have to if you want SLI support. Unless you can afford a Skulltrail.

Looking forward to the next build not using an Nvidia motherboard. Maybe without Nvidia around, performance motherboard prices can become reasonable again.


RE: Smart Move
By MonkeyPaw on 8/11/2008 5:58:33 PM , Rating: 4
The problem with Intel's future license of SLI is that the boards still require an nVidia chip. Not only that, board makers have to redesign the layout of the PCIe lanes to accommodate this extra hardware. Add the cost of the chip and the cost of the design change, and those really expensive high-end boards from Intel just got really, really expensive. nVidia's Intel boards have been price competitive, but Intel+nVidia boards will be cost-prohibitive.

To me, that's a double whammy on nVidia, as it pushes SLI even further to the high-end, and it puts more pressure on nVidia to produce faster, single GPU cards to go in all the non-SLI boards that will soon be out there. That has basically stolen sales from nVidia's most profitable segment--selling 2 cards to one user. Of course, nVidia did this to themselves by keeping SLI to themselves. ATI left Crossfire open, and has since been able to reap the benefits of sales on both Intel and AMD chipsets.


RE: Smart Move
By Fanon on 8/11/2008 6:00:47 PM , Rating: 3
With nForce2 though nForce4, you couldn't find a better chipset from any other company for the AMD platform. I can't comment on today's nVidia chipsets; when AMD canned socket 939 and Intel took the crown with Core 2, I started purchasing Intel chips and Intel-based boards.


RE: Smart Move
By FITCamaro on 8/11/2008 11:31:26 PM , Rating: 2
Yes you're right. The NForce 2 was wonderful. Especially the Soundstorm audio that was so good it made it into the Xbox. The NForce 3 was also good. The NForce 4 was when things started to go awry. After it, Nvidia's chipsets have just gotten more and more bloated as they added niche features no one really wanted.


RE: Smart Move
By JonnyDough on 8/12/2008 2:29:52 AM , Rating: 2
The NForce4 likes to get hot, especially when it's got a 6100 or 6150 integrated GPU with it. The thing that Nvidia still needs to work on is drivers. They are horrible at drivers, and do you know why? Because they optimize them for benchmarks and specific titles, rather than making all titles work. NeverWinter Nights doesn't even work on 8800s but it did with older drivers. AMD has no issue with the game. How sad is that?


RE: Smart Move
By walk2k on 8/11/08, Rating: -1
Moving on is the best thing for them
By mehran on 8/11/2008 6:01:43 PM , Rating: 3
With the new via nano coming out at least the company has a direction and knows what it wants. I love a under dog and via is a under under dog(below amd) and i must say this nano looks not to bad. i have a eye on building a low power system around this nano or getting a netbook with one.

In a way intel have validated VIA with the atom cpu and the direction they head in.




By Chadder007 on 8/11/2008 6:31:32 PM , Rating: 4
The Nano actually looks awesome...I just wish someone would actually use the chip. Where are the netbooks with Nano in them?


RE: Moving on is the best thing for them
By StevoLincolnite on 8/11/2008 8:49:49 PM , Rating: 2
I to would love a system based on the Nano, but in a 15.4" Notebook Form factor with possibly a more powerful Integrated Delta Chrome card which would put increased pressure on Intels Atom Processor, and Integrated Graphics.

Did I mention better availability? For instance It's nice Via have these things out there, but there is next-to-no advertising so allot of people don't even know they exist.

They could also try and get OEM's like Dell, HP and Acer and what-not to design systems around the Nano Platform, which would also address part of the Advertising concerns as the systems would become more common place, and hopefully cheaper.


By StevoLincolnite on 8/11/2008 8:53:53 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
They could also try and get OEM's like Dell, HP and Acer and what-not to design systems around the Nano Platform, which would also address part of the Advertising concerns as the systems would become more common place, and hopefully cheaper.


Supposed to be:

They could also get OEM's to design MORE systems, like Mini Notebooks, Mini Desktops, Tablets, Car PC's, HTPC's.


Wow
By Totally on 8/11/2008 5:44:58 PM , Rating: 3
Unrelated

Adwords, they're annoying and all over the place, like little land mines on your screen that go off when you HOVER over them. I can't even read an article in piece, +1 Adblock user.




RE: Wow
By majBUZZ on 8/11/2008 7:25:22 PM , Rating: 4
dude firefox + adblock is all you need


RE: Wow
By JonnyDough on 8/12/2008 2:57:48 AM , Rating: 2
With my slower broadband wireless connection I've got to say that adblock plus is a real blessing. I don't know how the heck we ever got by with 14.4, 28.8, 56K...and AOL, NetScape, Earthlink, Juno...etc. Thank god for broadband too eh? No longer do I have to sit and wait 5 minutes to see one low res porn pic. :-P


Good Riddance
By mindless1 on 8/12/2008 3:53:25 AM , Rating: 2
Via was always a joke. Every chipset they had, underperformed and had more than it's share of quirks or really I mean bugs.

From terrible memory bandwith to southbridge IDE corruption to ridiculous PCI performance Via has always been the worst choice for anyone trying to maximize performance and functionality in a fully compatible system versus just some random test without much of anything plugged into the motherboard.

YES! Get out of town via, every single board I had with your chipset on it felt like I was cheated. The only exception was 694X and then only because intel's alternative 815 chipset had a 512MB memory limit. Via basically designs half-assed yesteryear products for new platforms then tries to charge more than it'd worth.

Via always had this crazy idea that cheating is ok, to pretend something is workable when it isn't actually, including most of their claims about their integrated video over many years,

I would've liked to have seen a few class action lawsuits against Via. What a joke they are.




RE: Good Riddance
By wetwareinterface on 8/12/2008 5:32:06 AM , Rating: 2
wow, bitter much?
every manufacturer has had bad chipsets or bugs in their chipsets. intel currently has a wonderful dx9 capable onboard video... oh wait that's right it isn't fully dx9 capable after all and vista aero doesn't work with it and intel can't fix the problems other than to sell you a 4500 series integrated video chip.

nvidia has fumbled the ball too, the nforce 3 series was plauged by issues and poor ide performance on the opteron side, via being the only stable chipset on the launch of the opteron with agp slots.

everyone has had problems in the chipset market, via offered the first 133 mhz supported fsb on intel when intel said it wasn't feasible.

sure there were some duds in there but overall they didn't do any worse or better than intel or nvidia. amd was the one who faltered drastically on including features and sis and uli were horrible at bug ridden platforms.


RE: Good Riddance
By jabber on 8/12/2008 6:33:16 AM , Rating: 2
I would have to say I agree to that seeing VIA go is not a bad thing.

Was never totally convinced by their boards/chipsets. So much so that I have run a total Nvidia/Intel policy for several years now.

Folks bring me gippy PC's that just wont run stable. Oh surprise surprise its got a VIA/SiS MB in it. Swap it out for a cheap NF/Intel and 'hey presto' rock solid once again.

I shiver when I think of that KT7A that wouldnt play nice with USB and Soundblaster cards. Yuk.

Would never rely on a VIA USB2 chipset either. They just never had the juice. NEC all the way.

Its a shame but its not like these problems were new or unheard of.


RE: Good Riddance
By mindless1 on 8/13/2008 1:22:37 AM , Rating: 2
You might note I didn't say anything about intel.

nVidia has never come close to all the disappointments seen regularly with Via chipsets.

Via = fail


There's only one direction left for VIA now...
By Cullinaire on 8/11/2008 5:37:48 PM , Rating: 2
I predict that VIA will have their own discrete graphics solutions by 2012.




By poundsmack on 8/11/2008 5:41:48 PM , Rating: 2
perhaps something like S3? :)

http://www.s3graphics.com/en/

as far as i recall they are owend by VIA, though I could be wrong


By StevoLincolnite on 8/11/2008 8:45:26 PM , Rating: 3
You would be correct that Via does own S3.

The Chrome' Series of cards have been released for awhile, and a Direct X 10 part is in the pipeline, but the performance or drivers are severely lacking to be a competitor to nVidia and ATI.

I would personally love for S3 to come back, along with Matrox and start making High performance parts which then might make ATI and nVidia look back and lower the prices in order to better compete.

The Savage/Older Chrome/Parhelia were not the answers that gamers wanted unfortunately.


Good bye
By vbNetGuy on 8/11/2008 4:11:23 PM , Rating: 3
Good bye old friend.




RE: Good bye
By KorruptioN on 8/11/2008 10:49:39 PM , Rating: 2
KT266A. We'll miss you.


That's too bad
By Chriz on 8/11/2008 5:54:36 PM , Rating: 2
Before Nvidia entered the chipset market, VIA made some great chipsets for the AMD platform. My Asus board had a VIA chipset when I had an Athlon XP. Anandtech gave them some pretty good reviews as well. I guess we'll see if Nvidia and SiS follow suit, although I would think Nvidia would be hurting more.




RE: That's too bad
By StevoLincolnite on 8/11/2008 8:51:45 PM , Rating: 3
It almost seemed as though suddenly overnight Via was forgotten about on the AMD Chipset side of things, and all the rage was nVidia, sad to see it happen as Via really did have some solid offerings for a long time.


Wow
By VoodooChicken on 8/11/08, Rating: 0
RE: Wow
By BruceLeet on 8/11/2008 4:26:21 PM , Rating: 2
And suprisingly, thats all you have to say!?


RE: Wow
By VoodooChicken on 8/11/2008 5:23:46 PM , Rating: 2
I know! But words just fail me right now. Then again, it's not every day a stalwart decides to pursue other interests.


Pretty surprising
By Operandi on 8/11/2008 6:30:32 PM , Rating: 2
While the chipset market is shrinking and the Nano is pretty impressive doesn't it seem a bit risky to move your company into a position where you effectively going head to head with Intel (and at some point AMD) rather than working with them.




RE: Pretty surprising
By CyborgTMT on 8/12/2008 2:59:58 AM , Rating: 2
Not really... Neither Intel or AMD want to sell a cpu at low end of the spectrum. Compared to their other offerings they make very little money off each sale. This is part of the reason Intel limits what can be placed on an Atom motherboard so people are forced to purchase a more expensive cpu if they want added features. VIA on the other hand encourages it's partners to pack as much into each system as they can.


and then there were few
By RamarC on 8/11/2008 7:25:25 PM , Rating: 2
:(




By Staples on 8/12/2008 10:13:02 AM , Rating: 2
AMD made pretty mediocre chipsets and the vast majority of AMD chipsets were from NVIDIA and VIA. Now that AMD bought ATI, they are using their new resources to make decent chipsets. This has really put a squeeze on NVIDIA and pushed VIA out of the virtually out of the market since AMD platforms was their only market. Besides a few of the early P4 chipsets, Intel has always made great chipsets and most of their platforms came equiped with Intel chipsets.




By cubdukat on 8/12/2008 11:51:43 AM , Rating: 1
Can't say I'm gonna miss VIA. There is a market for third-party chipsets out there, just not for theirs.

The first serious MB I got was a VIA-Powered Abit Socket 370 board. I had nothing but trouble on it. I was hit by the infamous 686B bug, and it caused recordings I made with my Studio DC10plus to glitch. The first chance I got, I dumped it for an Intel chipset. Now that one didn't work out too much better, but that's a different story.

Now, many may have had generally positive experience with VIA-powered chipsets, but as far as I'm concerned, good riddance to them. Any company that would have the bright idea of buying the company formerly known as S3 doesn't deserve to exist. Oh, yeah, that's another advantage--one more purveyor of useless integrated graphics off the market.




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