Third party chipsets: VIA confirms its pullout

Richard Brown, Vice-President of marketing at VIA, has confirmed to his compatriots at Custom PC that his firm would no longer produce chipsets for Intel and AMD processors and that it would now concentrate on its own platform and Nano processors. He defends this move as being a natural evolution and explains that this is the reason the Taiwanese company launched itself on the x86 CPU market.

However, some will point out that with the buyout of Cyrix and Centaur almost 10 years ago, the licensing problems with Intel for Pentium 4 chipsets with DDR support and the arrival of Nvidia on the AMD platform, VIA were never really able to make a comeback (and its controversial reputation didn’t help). The departure of 40 or so of its technicians last year also seems to have dealt a fatal blow to its former main activity. Now we will just have to see if the Nano and latest S3 GPUs will be profitable and if Nvidia will stay on the chipset market...