VIA, that once famous company which has petered out in the North American market is back in the news. According to DigiTimes they recently joined forces with a firm owned by the Chinese government and is now moving production over to new facilities. VIA has only 20% of this new joint venture which could signal the final end to their existence as a producer of x86 processors. The move could be influenced by Intel, who license both the PCIe and x86 technology to VIA but this is deemed unlikely as Intel would like to stay on the Chinese governments good side. The current Nano and V7 are Vista capable and appear in mobile devices in the AP region.
"VIA Technologies is rumored to have started shifting its x86 CPU technologies and related personnel to its newly formed IC design joint venture with a China government-owned investment firm, according to market watchers, adding that VIA recently notified clients that it will stop supplying x86 processors temporarily."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- SkyDrive is dead! All hail Microsoft OneDrive! Happy now, Uncle Rupe? @ The Register
- Microsoft cries out to UK government against open source @ The Inquirer
- Cisco's the new Tivo, pumps out 'DVR in the cloud' offering @ The Register
I was thinking in the past
I was thinking in the past about an ARM based tablet with wondermedia(VIA) SoC, but the fact is that VIA couldn’t even compete at that market. Their products even in the ARM arena where too little too late. Pity.
I’ve no interest in Via. I
I’ve no interest in Via. I have used their products for years and yet I kept hoping they would catch up to AMD and Intel but they never even tried to.
They choose to make low cost designs then try to make more profit than they should. Networking, motherboard chipsets, processors, were all very poor performers compared to their competitors at the time.
The only time in history that a Via product was preferred was a very short era when Intel made chipsets (i815?) for coppermine and tualatin CPUs that were crippled with only 512MB memory support and Via’s supported something around 1.5GB at a time when 512MB was looking like an unnecessary handicap with memory quite cheap as there was a surplus in the industry and it was being almost given away free.
What about SIS? Let’s resurrect them, join them with Via and the Chinese government, and end up with a company loaded with fail.
LOL… Spammers United in
LOL… Spammers United in this thread!
No doubt. For some reason
No doubt. For some reason PRAM and Ray Tracing also attract them like flies.
I remember having a 64MB
I remember having a 64MB integrated S3 GPU with a BIOSTAR VIA chipset. Pure Shit. It sucked hard. When I upgraded to an AMD chipset the jump in quality was very notorious.