Motherboards using VIA chipsets have been a rare sight over the last few years, which is a real shame since it used to be one of the leading chipset manufacturers for both AMD and Intel processors. Despite competitive prices it managed to deliver excellent performance and good features. But over the last few years, AMD, Intel and NVIDIA have been overshadowing VIA, which has now forced VIA to shut down its chipset development for third party platforms. VIA's new focus is on x86 processors and integrated motherboards for its own platforms.
VIA points out that the biggest reason for starting to develop x86 processors was that it thought that the third party market for chipsets would die out sooner or later. It now says that this is very much the case today;
‘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.’
We're very curious to see what VIA will do to the processor market and hopefully follow up its Nano with something even better.
VIA closes chipset division
Winter? Hardware is blocking the windows
