VIA Technologies
VIA Technologies is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory, and is part of the Formosa Plastics group. It is the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets.
History
The company was founded in 1987 from the Symphony Company in Silicon Valley by, among others, Wen Chi Chen (陳文琦) (who was employed at Intel before joining Symphony), who is still CEO of the company. Chen transferred the employees of Symphony to Taiwan to start chip production.
In 1992 Headquarters were moved to Taipei, Taiwan
In 1996 VIA played a major part in the PC Common Architecture standard group, pushing the switch from the ISA bus to the PCI bus.
In 1999 it acquired most of Cyrix (then a division of National Semiconductor) and also Centaur, marking its entry into the microprocessor market. VIA is the maker of the VIA C3 and VIA C7 processors and the EPIA platform.
In 2001 VIA established the S3 Graphics Co., Ltd. joint venture
Products
VIA designs chipsets, which are made under contract at foundaries. Companies such as Asus then buy the chipsets, and implement them in their own brand products. VIA has sought to diversy round the core business, and has made acquisitions to provide a CPU division, graphics division, and a sound division. While not a globally recognised brand, one or more of VIA's many chipsets feature in a wide variety of consumer products.
Motherboard Chipsets
- Apollo Pro133 - The first VIA Intel chipset to support a FSB of 133 MHz for the Intel processors (Slot 1/Socket 370). Like all other VIA chipsets it is asynchronous, and perhaps most importantly, supported 133 MHz SDRAM memory. The Apollo Pro133A featured AGP 4X support.
- Apollo Pro133A, Apollo KX133/KT133/KT133A - The Apollo KX133 was a derivative chipset for the AMD Athlon, Slot A. Following that came the Apollo KT133 for AMD Athlon/Duron, Socket ). The chipset was revised to the KT133A spec, featuring memory controller tweaks, and improved features. The KT133A proved a popular chipset with stability and performance.
- ProSavage PM133/KM133 - The PM133/KM133 are based upon a graphics core from S3 , derived from a combination of the 3D-component of Savage4 and 2D from Savage2000. They were VIA’s first in house integrated chipsets.
Market Trends
While an established supplier of PC components, notably for the [super socket 7] platform, VIA initially became a global brand largely as a result of its Pentium III chipsets. Intel made the mistake of discontinuing development of its SDRAM chipsets, and stated as policy only RAMBUS memory would be supported going forward. Since RAMBUS was both more expensive at the time, and offered few if any obvious performance advantages, manufacturers found they could ship performance equivalent PCs at a lower cost by using VIA chipsets.
While historically VIA chipsets had been plagued by compatibility and performance issues, especially as regards AGP implementations, an internal program to raise standards had also begun to show results. VIA’s fast performing, stable, mature chipsets, suddenly found huge market appeal, and profits soared. At the same time VIA benefited from AMD’s popular Athlon processor. As the sole supplier of performance chipsets for the Athlon, and basking in the glory of its popular Pentium III chipsets, VIA also sold large numbers of Athlon chipsets.
However, VIA’s success was as much based upon the mistakes of others, as its own internal excellence. Intel eventually rescinded their SDRAM development halt, and produced the 815 chipset. NVIDIA came out with the nForce 2 chipset for the Athlon. VIA’s market share declined.
In response to growing pressures, VIA made the astute decision to buy out the ailing S3 graphics business. While the Savage chipset was not fast enough to survive as a discrete solution, with its low manufacturing cost it made an ideal integrated solution, as part of the VIA north bridge. This considerably enhanced the value proposition of VIA’s chipsets.
VIA also continued development of its VIA C3 processor, targeting small, light, low power applications. A market space in which they continue to obtain success. VIA remains a powerful force in the PC industry, and captured the majority of the Athlon 64 market at launch, with a high quality full featured chipset. The Via envy soundcard has set new standards for onborad PC audio with pure 24 bit sound. And under the guidance of VIA, the S3 brand has generally held onto a respectable 10% share of the PC graphics market, behind Intel, ATI, and nVidia.