News VIA to stop making Intel chipsets?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/07/06/via_to_quit_making_intel_chipsets/1

Due to VIA suffering a license dispute and falling market share the Intel chipset market, it has quit while it's ahead. Instead the company will focus solely on making chipsets for its own C7 CPUs.

 

VIA chipsets allways seemed to be one of the better bets on low-end boards, and ASRock seemed to be able to do so much for them, and make them into upgraders dream boards...

Thats the world of bussinss I suppose.

 

how i hate my via chipset motherboard. I hope they have luck with their UMPC, it looks nice, i just wish it had a touch screen and was cheaper.

 

VIA did very well for the K8 generation while the nForce chipsets were still priced high.

 

well, I for one love my OQO model 2.

and I currently have plans to cluster a few C7s in this fashion: http://www.mini-itx.com/2007/02/26/the-octimod-mini-itx-cluster

first I have to get on better terms with gentoo....

 

Why? If a 30W mini-itx is some 10x slower than a dual core X6800 which runs at 180W for the whole system, the Intel is still greener.

 

Ha ha. Exactly what I've been thinking every time I've seen those mini-itx clusters Plus the dual core setup would cost you less

The only reason I can think of for building such a cluster is to learn about cluster computing.

 

it's too bad they're out of the market for chipsets.. I was really hoping they'd come through with a "Core2" chipset sometime in the future

 

My previous Athlon64 motherboard (Asus A8V) was VIA based. It was a horrible thing, which conflicted with my 6600GT all the time, for some reason.

 

nooooo - dont leave us with only SiS *sobs*

 

Yeah, i had the same thing. I had always gone for VIA boards before, but when i bought the A8V it conflicted with my Soundblaster (it would crackle continually on first boot, and only rebooting would fix it), and hooking my ipod up to a USB2 socket would cause the machine to reboot.

After about a month i swapped it out for the A8N-E Nforce4 board, everything is running sweet now. I wouldn't go back to a VIA chipset after that experience.

 

VIA make some very solid and stable chipsets so it's a damn shame to see them stop making them. As said above, who wants a SiS?

OK so you couldn't OC on them for love nor money, but they were damn solid

I just hope they continue to make their excellent CPU's

 

Yep the ASRock 775 VIA boards were fantastic for upgraders, i had one and did the same. Great value too.

I read a while ago in micromart mag that the main reason ASRock had announced that it's great selling 4CoreDual-VSTA would no longer be manufactured so shortly after launch was because they had run out of the VIA PT880 Ultra northbridge chips. VIA was reluctant to manufacture any more so ASRock had no choice. Seems to tie in with the latest news. Shame really.

 

ah yes but who else could you buy a whole uptodate motherboard for £12 from :O (admitidly I did spend weeks fixing the configuration and driver problems)

 

lol - they may work (just) on windows, but beyond that they are hell

i have a sis motherboard, not only would the on board graphics not drive 1280x1024 (no matter how much ram i allocated in the bios) but the drivers were appalling, i tried using ubuntu on the machine at one point and ran into even more problems
I really really hate sis, they just make crap, and their driver support is rubbish (just in windows, not even including the lack of linux support)

 

I don't get it. Why limit yourself to a niche market when AMD are clearly in need of a killer chipset? I can hardly imagine AMD worrying about a third party encroaching on their oh-so-amazing chipset business.

At least not for the moment - maybe Via can see it coming from AMD too.

Here's some thought: Intel make chipsets, CPUs and graphics cards. They have teams for each. AMD through the acquisition of ATI, have all three too.

Nvidia do chipsets and GPUs. What's to stop them buying Via, assimilating the chipset business (and keeping the Via name/product range for the continuation of the SFF market) and using the newly-acquired x86 license to begin making some insane CPUs? If Via's value were to drop too much, the vultures will begin to circle.