X-bit labs

Intel Chipset’s Market Share Rises, VIA and SiS in Danger.

Category: Other

by Anton Shilov

[ 08/31/2002 | 07:11 PM ]

Intel was pretty passive on the chipset market in 1999 and 2000 and VIA managed to expand their market share very significantly at that time. A year ago VIA served about 48% of the market and SiS accompanied by ALi shared 12%. However, with the introduction of i845 series of core-logic sets, the largest semiconductor manufacturer started to fight back their market share and succeeded in taking almost 60% of the chipset market by the third quarter 2002.

According to IDC, Intel increased their market presence from 57% in the first quarter to 59.6% in the second quarter 2002. VIA`s share plummeted 3.5% down to 22%, SiS managed to expand their share to 14.3% from 12.3% for the same period. Other core-logic developers like ALi or NVIDIA now share 4.1% of the market down 0.9% from 5%.

The changes of the chipset arena are quite understandable, as well as the reasons they are caused by. Intel started to push its Pentium 4 processors very strongly last year and the market adopted the newcomer fastly. Since VIA has no license on the Quad-Pumped Bus, their Pentium 4 products are not popular among first-tier mainboard makers as well as PC-vendors. Furthermore, currently VIA has no clear advantages in terms of pricing or features they offer, as Intel is now very aggressive and introduces improved chipsets almost every quarter. Although SiS’ share continues to grow, it is quite natural that it does not increase rapidly due to the same reasons. Moreover, SiS does not earn a lot selling their core-logic devices as they have to price them considerably lower than Intel does. Keeping in mind that integrated products with lower profit margin account a large portion of their chipsets, we can conclude that SiS is not likely to benefit much from their growing market share.

Given that Intel is only going to continue improving their integrated and discrete core-logic devices, analyst state that their chipset business will continue to expand. As for VIA and NVIDIA, they will definitely enjoy greater sales of their core-logic sets as they concentrate on AMD x86-64 and K7 platforms that are likely to take a big part of the CPU market next year.