by Anton Shilov
08/29/2002 | 06:16 AM
A lot of things are always told about VIA Technologies and quality of their chipsets. Some dislike the company’s strategy to introduce improved devices in a quarter and a half, some find out different bugs in VIA’s products and so on. Historically, VIA and AMD used to be the only serious core-logic developers for the Socket A platform. ALi used to be too weak and introduced slow and inadequate solutions, SiS was not practically presented at all. Last year NVIDIA and SiS decided to attack the market with their nForce and SiS735 series of chipsets. The former was not very persistent and their market share is now very small, the latter was also presented very narrowly. So, VIA Technologies remained the only serious player on the market and it is no surprise that their chipsets are now used in 70% of Socket A mainboards currently made.
It is the third quarter of 2002, nothing has actually changed. SiS announced their SiS746 and even SiS746DX this Summer, but has not started to ship them. NVIDIA also unveiled the nForce2, but mainboards based on this most feature-rich core-logic will only start selling in September. ALi is out of Socket A business. VIA has started supplying its KT400 and now leads the market.<%BANNER[article]%>
Keeping in mind that system integrators always buy not very expensive products, VIA is not sure that they will discontinue its KT333 chipset. However, offering 333MHz FSB and AGP 8x support now, VIA can grab a significant share on DIY market among enthusiasts. Later, the KT400 will move to PCs offered by various vendors.
So, either VIA makes stable and fast chipsets or not, they will lead this market until the better solutions are offered widely. To tell you the truth, NVIDIA said they were going to be very aggressive with their nForce2 pricing strategy. Well, maybe a real rival for VIA is finally born?