VIA Leaves Chipset Business

VIA says there is no longer a place for third party chipset makers
By Shane McGlaun - August 11, 2008

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.

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