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
In February 2005, VIA celebrated the production of the 100 Millionth VIA AMD chipset.
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 brand recognised by many consumers, one or more of VIA's many chipsets feature in a wide variety of consumer products.
Motherboard Chipsets
- VIA MVP3 - Popular super socket 7 chipset, with AGP interface 1.0, up to 512MB of PC-100 SDRAM, and up to 2MB L2 cache. Updated to MVP4 with integrated Trident graphics and improved ATA-66 disk interface.
- Apollo Pro133 - The first VIA Intel chipset to support a 133 MHz FSB (Slot 1/Socket 370), 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 A. 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 - 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.
- VIA KT266, VIA KT266A, VIA KT333, VIA KT400, VIA KT400A - A DDR memory refresh for the Athlon processor. The A spec part was notable for delivering an unexpected speed improvement. Subsequent versions updated to more recent memory speed grades, relfected in the chipset titles. Finally, KT880 matched the dual channel memory of the nForce2 chipset.
- VIA K8T800, VIA K8T800 PRO - Athlon 64 chipsets. Established an early market lead, with richer features, and a full speed HyperTransport implementation
Market Trends
While an established supplier of PC components, notably for the Super Socket 7 platform, VIA's present market position derives from the success 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 suffered 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. Many companies that had previously maintained Intel only buying policies, for the first time placed volume orders with VIA, and were satisfied with the results. At the same time VIA benefited from AMD’s popular Athlon processor. As the sole supplier of performance chipsets, VIA also sold millions of chipsets for the Athlon.
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, with 133 MHZ SDRAM support and a 133 Mhz Front Side Bus CPU interface. NVIDIA came out with the nForce 2 chipset for the Athlon. VIA’s market share declined.
In response to increasing market competition, 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. 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.
VIA continues to recognise the importance of its core business, and seeks to develop high quality chipsets. While its Pentium 4 designs have stuggled to win market share in the face of legal threats from Intel, the K8T800 chipset for the Athlon 64 has proved another success story, offering stability, performance, and features at launch that few expected. To this extent VIA has shown they have the ability to continue to suprise, and continue in the tradition of providing good enough products, at trademark OEM friendly low price points.