VIA heralds end of third-party PC chipset biz

Owned by Intel and AMD now

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

11th August 2008 15:10 GMT

VIA has tacitly confirmed that it's quitting the PC chipset business, claiming that there's no longer a third-party chipset market worth the name.

Richard Brown, VIA's marketing chief, told Custom PC: "We believed that ultimately the third-party chipset market would disappear... That has indeed come to pass."

VIA's perspective is that with Intel producing almost all the chipsets used with Intel processors, and with AMD increasingly the prime supplier of system logic for its own processors, there's a rapidly narrowing space for third-party chipset makers.

In VIA's case, it appears it has decided the gap is now too narrow, and it's getting out. At the very least, it saves it having to go to the expense of licensing Intel's new QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) bus, set to debut with the giant's 'Nehalem' CPUs.

Nvidia has a QPI licence, though it had to hand over its multi-GPU technology, SLI, in exchange.

Curiously, it's only weeks since it was claimed that Nvidia had come to the same conclusion. Nvidia quickly denied it, but while it soldiers on, it has to face the prospect that it's getting harder and harder to occupy anything more than a niche, particularly now Intel has SLI.

Meanwhile, VIA will leverage its chipset expertise to build system chippery for its own CPUs.