X-bit labs

Interview with VIA Technologies’ Ben Boyden

Category: Chipsets

by Anton Shilov

[ 01/06/2004 | 09:23 AM ]

VIA Technologies is a company, whose path resembles the history of the whole hardware industry within the recent decades. A small Asian company 10 years ago became the No.1 chipset maker in the late nineties, but then faced some serious challenges in its business only to return now with even more ambitions. Find out some future plans of Taipei, Taiwan-based IC designer from X-bit labs’ interview with Ben Boyden of VIA Technologies.

Table of contents:

• Introduction
  
• Business, Strategy
  
• Current Activities, Market Trends
  
• Future Products
  
• Technologies, Trends, Plans
  

Introduction

We at X-bit labs recently had a great opportunity to conduct an interview with Ben Boyden from VIA. The company is preparing quite a lot of new and exciting developments to see the light of the day next year, so, if you are interested, we have got a read for you about DDR-II, PCI Express and other 2004 introductions today.

X-bit labs: Hello, Ben. Please introduce yourself to X-bit labs readers and describe your role at VIA Technologies.

Ben Boyden: My name is Ben Boyden, and I am the marketing manager for the VIA Chipsets platform.

Business, Strategy

X-bit labs: VIA used to be the number one chipset company with over 50% of market share. As a result of your legal dispute with Intel, your positions are now much weaker than before; though, there are positive changes, one of the them is the settlement with Intel that could potentially improve your business in the Intel-compatible chipset market. Can you list the positive quantitative and qualitative changes in your chipset business after the Spring settlement?

Ben Boyden: It is no secret that prior to the legal issue being settled with Intel, for their own reasons a number of mainboard vendors chose not to use VIA chipsets for their Pentium 4 solutions. Since the legal issues were settled and a 10 year cross-license between VIA and Intel was signed, we have seen a complete about turn and now all the leading mainboard manufacturers are producing solutions based around our Pentium 4 compatible chipsets.  It goes without saying that this has had a positive impact on our business on the Intel processor platform, both in terms of end-user perception and revenues.

X-bit labs: Would you summarize your market share in Intel CPUs-supporting market now?

Ben Boyden: Currently we are the No.3 vendor for the Intel processor platform, but we are gaining market share constantly and expect to be the No.2 vendor on the Intel processor platform before 2H 2004.

X-bit labs: Would you elaborate on Intel chipset market share in percentage points?

Ben Boyden: Unfortunately we are unable to provide this information.

X-bit labs: Your positions in AMD market have been much stronger compared to Intel arena in the past 18 months. But you are also under heavy attack from NVIDIA. Quite some enthusiasts have been looking in NVIDIA’s nForce2 direction, but the nForce3 is not that successful at this point. Do you see a lot of positive opportunities for you in AMD64 arena?

Ben Boyden: Yes, since the first AMD Athlon processor was released way back in 1999, VIA has always been the No.1 chipset vendor on the AMD processor platform. NVIDIA has had some success with the nForce2, particularly among the enthusiast segment, but for the past few months the VIA KT600 has been reclaiming market share back from the nForce2. A major factor in the success of the KT600 has been its pairing with the feature packed VT8237 South Bridge, which boasts native Serial ATA-150 and V-RAID.

Of course yes, VIA have very strong hopes for the AMD64 processor platform. Although the 64-bit applications are not really there at the moment, the Athlon 64 processor offers superb performance in 32-bit applications and allows the headroom to move to 64-bit as and when that need is there. At the same time, the Opteron is proving a very worthy option for the server and workstation markets and is really gaining momentum.