According to our sources among the Taiwanese mainboard makers, VIA decided to increase the wholesale prices for its Pentium 4 chipsets last Monday, namely for P4X266 and its clones, and P4M266. The prices were supposed to get 10% higher, which will make all VIA solutions for Pentium 4 cost over $15.

The mainboard makers were pretty puzzled to hear that, however, almost all of them confirmed that this will hardly have any effect on their revenues or plans as their products based on VIA Pentium 4 chipsets enjoy very low popularity.

At the same time, it is very easy to explain what pushed VIA to make this decision. VIA failed to come to a compromise with Intel in terms of the Pentium 4 bus licensing, and they don’t have to start paying Intel any license fees, which could be one of the reasons for the chipset prices to go up. Other chipset makers (mainly SiS, which is VIA”s primary competitor in the Pentium 4 chipset field) didn’t increase the prices for their solutions, so it is also not the case. Maybe VIA chipsets suddenly got highly demanded? Nope, this is also not the case.

So, it turns out that by increasing the prices of its P4X266, P4X266E and P4M266 VIA will make its not very popular chipsets absolutely unpopular. In other words, it seems as if VIA were going to terminate the production of these solutions, because they have never been profitable for the company and by raising the prices they are trying to distract the mainboard makers from them. It’s true, VIA has some more up-to-date solutions at hand: P4X400 and P4M333. Besides, as we see the company is moving the focus slowly from the chipset business to controllers and other chips that is why it seems quite logical that they are trying to get rid of unprofitable products.

So, SiS can celebrate another victory now. The popularity of low-cost Pentium 4 chipsets from SiS, mainly SiS645DX and SiS650, may grow bigger in the nearest future, as there will be no VIA alternatives any more.