VIA quits motherboard chipset business

For Intel and AMD chips, anyway

AFTER WIDESPREAD rumours of Nvidia quitting the chipset business imminently, Via has announced it will also exit the once competitive motherboard chipset market.

Speaking to Custom PC, VIA vice president of corporate marketing in Taiwan, Richard Brown, outlined the reasoning behind the company's exit.

"One of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear, and we would need to have the capability to provide a complete platform."

"That has indeed come to pass," said Brown, adding: "Intel provides the vast majority of chipsets for its processors and, following its purchase of ATI, AMD is also moving very quickly in the same direction."

Although Via intends to stop manufacturing chipsets for Intel and AMD processors, it will still carry on fabricating chips for its own brand of Nano processors - which are in direct competition with Intel's new Atom.

This declaration from Brown hasn't come as a surprise to those in the industry.

Sources at the company had suggested that going forward the merged division would focus on supporting the company's own CPU platforms and slowly exit the third-party chipset market.

However, this is the first time we've heard the news coming from an official representative.