VIA distances itself a little more from the PC

Negociations seem to be dead between Intel and VIA dealing with the renewal of the latter’s liscence. While on paper the Taiwanese manufacturer may release a PT960 and PM960 destined for the latest Intel processors starting in the fourth quarter and SiS has already made an agreement three months ago regarding the official support of an FSB frequency of 1333MHz, potential buyers of a motherboard for the Core 2 Duo equipped with a VIA chipset will have to at best be happy with a 1066MHz FSB and DDR2-533.

In terms of AMD platforms, the buy-out of ATI by the Texan giant generated less enthusiasm at VIA, who is already in competition with Nvidia on this small sized market with regards to AMD CPUs.

Digitimes has announced that they have information from PC makers close to VIA saying that the company will concentrate more on chipsets for its own C7 processor platforms and devote fewer development resources to platforms destined for the competition. Overall, everything is still possible, but it’s assumed that in the future if VIA manages to be stay on Intel and AMD platforms, its role will be even smaller than it currently is. This company is still gravitating more towards certain niche markets (ultra portables, point of sale terminals, set-top boxes, etc..).