VIA Announces It Sold Off Part Of Its Assets

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VIA Announces It Sold Off Part Of Its Assets

It's been a while since last hearing anything major out of VIA Technologies, but they made an announcement today.....

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VIA-Announces-Telecom-Sale

[Azrael5]

in 2006-2007 VIA lost its opportunity because of lacking in VT8251 on pt880/890 systems.

[duby229]

in 2006-2007 VIA lost its opportunity because of lack of VT8251 in pt880/890 systems.

It was the AMD/ATi merger. Once AMD got it's own platform it pushed nvidia, via, sis, and ali out of the platform business for the most part. Those companies platforms relied on AMD.... And Via themselves was never able to invest enough R&D into it's own x86 business that it aquired from Cyrix.

[Azrael5]

It was the AMD/ATi merger. Once AMD got it's own platform it pushed nvidia, via, sis, and ali out of the platform business for the most part. Those companies platforms relied on AMD.... And Via themselves was never able to invest enough R&D into it's own x86 business that it aquired from Cyrix.

I remember that Nvidia bought both AGEIA physx and ULI excellences making worst market reducing competition and developpement in this sectors, uli became nforce.

VIA had the opoportunity to match northbridge PT880/890 with VT8251 which provided NCQ and high SATA/RAID performance as southbridge but this chipset was only used by ASUS in some deprecated motherboards matching them with poor northbridge, so VIA missed competition with INTEL and AMD. 4COREDUAL-SATA2 for example was one of that mainboard model which could gave the right impulse to VIA showing its potentiality and competitiveness.

[duby229]

I remember that Nvidia bought both physx and ULI excellences making worst market reducing competition and developpement in this sectors, uli became nforce.

VIA had the opoportunity to match northbridge PT880/890 with VT8251 which provided NCQ and high SATA/RAID performance as southbridge but this chipset was only used by ASUS in some deprecated motherboards matching them with poor northbridge, so VIA missed competition with INTEL and AMD. 4COREDUAL-SATA2 for example was one of that mainboard model which could gave the right impulse to VIA showing its potentiality and competitiveness.

I do remember the wierd nForce/ ULI combo, but that was result of AMD licensing of ((HYPERTRANSPORT). nForce3 was almost Identical to AMDs own (8111) northbridge, which also had the same weird ULI combo. Earlier when the nForce 2 launched nVidia had a working southbridge that was actually pretty damn good.

nForce 3 attempted to unify the chipset bridges at least partially and that's what Via was attempting as well. Both of them sorta failed, but I think nVidia was more successful at it than Via.

EDIT: Actually, I just did a quick google search and so I corrected some wrong info.

[GDJacobs]

I do remember the wierd nForce/ ULI combo, but that was result of AMD licensing of ((HYPERTRANSPORT). nForce3 was almost Identical to AMDs own (8111) northbridge, which also had the same weird ULI combo. Earlier when the nForce 2 launched nVidia had a working southbridge that was actually pretty damn good.

nForce 3 attempted to unify the chipset bridges at least partially and that's what Via was attempting as well. Both of them sorta failed, but I think nVidia was more successful at it than Via.

EDIT: Actually, I just did a quick google search and so I corrected some wrong info.

NForce3 was a single chip solution, like SIS had been doing for a while. Nforce2 used HT. VIA was consistent with their north-south approach, but they had lost tempo by the time Athlon64 came out. The lack of support for SLI or Crossfire basically doomed them.

I think the parallel you're thinking of is the AMD 8111 and the NForce Pro series. The 8111 bridged HT to AGP devices where the NForce bridged HT to PCIe devices. ULi had a chip that could bridge to both. ULi I/O controllers weren't used too much with the AMD-8000 series chipset. They were used heavily with ATI north bridges before NVidia bought ULi and discontinued shipments, and before the SB600 came about [see below], as the earlier ATI south bridges were pretty useless.

http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/motherboard_view.asp?productid=3&proname=A210GDAG