Wait wait wait... VIA is still in business? What exactly are they making that is profitable? They literally had the worst and buggiest chipsets, and their C series CPUs were worse than intel Atom. I know they did low power designs, but I don't think they even bothered to switch over to ARM architecture.
I think the successor companies are only loosely related any more, but it's not really clear how closely they work together, as far as I can tell it's something like:
- VIA Technologies (https://www.viatech.com/en/) is what is left of the old parent company, but now mainly sells embedded systems based on both old VIA chip designs and third-party chips from NXP, Qualcomm and others. - VIA Labs (via-labs.com) is a separate company or subsidiary and they sell USB and SATA peripheral chips - VIA Telecom was sold to Intel a while ago, and presumably ended up in the 5G chip division that is now part of Apple - Wondermedia was spun out as the company to make ARM SoCs, which decent success in early Android tablets but never made it to 64-bit designs before they disappeared. - Zhaoxin appears to have inherited the SoC business, both x86 and Arm chips, but is only minority owned by VIA - Centaur's recently announced CNS chips look like they have the same heritage as Zhaoxin's ZX series but are now developed independently.
If I remember correctly, they had the USB controller of choice at the launch of USB 2.0. Before that, I think they had the first 100MHz FSB chipset in the days of Intel BX (i.e. Pentium II and Pentium !!!). Haven't heard much of them since then.
Their last X86 chipset is in P4, it is where Intel and VIA had disagreements, since then Intel don't give license to make chipset for their chips. Though Intel offered ditch the x86 license to continue as chipset partner manufacturer but VIA declined.
Actually the Nano series proved to be superior to the Atom. I don't think the power savings was quite there, but it was close. Performance was overall quite better. They never got the press attention in my opinion, but at the time it was good option.
We still run a dual core fanless model with pfsense for our main office.
VIA also made it possible for Agner Fog to expose Intel’s ‘Genuine Intel’ benchmark scam — by engineering its processor to be able to be seen by software as an Intel CPU.
I don't fully agree that their chipsets were "the worst and buggiest". They actually had pretty good memory controller designs back in the socket A days. Most of the problems and bad reputation came from the windows drivers never having been updated. I actually preferred via chipsets back then and kinda miss via fading into irrelevance. In many cases they were better than sis or ALi, in those days, and cheaper than the nforce, amd, or intel chipset boards. I had high hopes that either via or transmeta would make a breakthrough in cpu design ... ohhh well RIP.
Actually, it depended HEAVILY on the chipset in question. Even with the latest beta drivers and BIOS, KT133 reliability was questionable, at best. Meanwhile, KT133A was rock solid. Ditto for the switch to DDR... the KT266 was dodgy. The KT266A was extremely reliable. After that, the KT333 and 400 were also pretty good, thankfully. There were a lot of good, affordable boards built on those chipsets. After that though... they started to fall behind the competition.
Is this literally just a way of ensuring the 3rd licence holder will always be unable to use it? Or be purchased by someone Intel doesn't want to have it? Would love to know what the state of the x86 licence is after this. If it achieved getting it out of circulation, seems like a cheap deal for Intel, and gets some engineers too!
If what I remember is correct, the x86 licenses can't be sold. If NVidia would really want the license to produce x86 processors, they might let themselves be bought by VIA (the other way around wouldn't work).
That was part of the AMD settlement, it is not part of the license. Via actually got their license by buying National Semiconductors' x86 division, which National got by buying Cyrix.
And just to make things more complex, Cyrix got their license by suing Intel.
Intel sued Cyrix for reverse-engineering the 486, and patent infringement. The courts said Cyrix was fine, and Intel licensed them the patents in question to make an antitrust suit Cyrix filed go away.
They got a full x86 license by suing Intel for patent infringement, claiming the P2 and PPro were ripping off Cyrix's power-management patents. Intel settled to make that one go away.
Wow! Never heard that. Though I live on that period of era already, I also tested Cyrix on that period, yes it is on par with Intel or maybe better than AMD.
Chump change for Intel. They probably found some really talented engineers in the team and VIA has some sort of binding clause in their employment contract that won't let them quit and work for a competitor immediately. This is VIA's price for nullifying that contract. But it's also possible that this is an attempt by Intel to take away their most senior engineers, to make sure VIA don't become a threat to them anytime in the near future.
VIA isn't a threat to anyone. They're probably just dumping their x86 design team because they've seen the writing on the wall - with stiff competition from AMD in servers, and real competition from ARM-based SoC's everywhere (And in the future also RISC-V SoC's), VIA's x86 license and design capabilities are now worth essentially nothing.
China probably also prefers having their own CPU architecture, so accessing VIA's x86 license through Zhaoxin will become an unecessary nuisance.
And you forget how incredibly territorial intel gets over x86. The opportunity to reclaim one of the old forever licenses they were forced to hand out would likely be snatched up regardless of the price asked.I bet via could have gotten more, frankly.
There are no details on the deal (other than the price). This might be buried somewhere in the "small print". Regardless of how much they want to kill the x86 license of VIA, they wouldn't want everybody to know that there are even more choices to x86 than itself.
In Silicon Valley, $125M is nothing. That's like the salary for a medium size team (100 eng) for 3-5 years and tapeout money. This is an extremely low price, the patents and engineers should be worth way more, probably a testament to how worthless x86 is seen going fwd.
I'm pretty sure I've read about Chinese x86 CPUs that were heavy derivatives and then completely independent of Centaur's IP. And I'm not talking about Zhaoxin's Zen-based server CPU.
This is the most confusing "Acquisition announcement I've ever read, but if it's for the entire division, that means VIA has lost 2/3 of the value it paid for (255 for Cyrix, plus 167 million for Centaur)
Is Formosa Plastics finally tired of losing money yearly on VIA?
The x86 license cannot be transferred so Nvidia buying up VIA wouldn't work. The x86 license belongs to VIA and VIA alone. Nvidia tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get into x86, then they realized (since before Denver times) ARM will do just fine.
So if Intel purchases the development team, that means that (without a dev team) VIA can't produce new x86 designs. Thus, Intel wins without buying the IP.
I don't think this is about x86. I think it's about that NPU/ AI / inference accelerator. Intel wants an answer to Google/Apple's inclusion of an NPU on thier SoC (and potentially a tensor core in thier gpu). Via want's a better cpu to pair it with and intel can actually access Fabrication facilites (pretty hard for low volume/specialty chip producers tight now with TSMC or samsung)
I can’t argue that they don’t need more IP and engineers for that, but they have made several large purchases in that field recently. Nervana, Habana, Cnvrg.io, and SigOpt.
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meacupla - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
Wait wait wait... VIA is still in business?What exactly are they making that is profitable?
They literally had the worst and buggiest chipsets, and their C series CPUs were worse than intel Atom.
I know they did low power designs, but I don't think they even bothered to switch over to ARM architecture.
Who still uses them?
StevoLincolnite - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
They make a ton of IC's. Networking, Audio. etc',They also appeal to various industrial applications.. Automation, safety and so forth.
They also have a big presence in the chinese market.. Aka. Zhaoxin.
arnd - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
I think the successor companies are only loosely related any more, but it's not really clear how closely they work together, as far as I can tell it's something like:- VIA Technologies (https://www.viatech.com/en/) is what is left of the old parent company, but now mainly sells embedded systems based on both old VIA chip designs and third-party chips from NXP, Qualcomm and others.
- VIA Labs (via-labs.com) is a separate company or subsidiary and they sell USB and SATA peripheral chips
- VIA Telecom was sold to Intel a while ago, and presumably ended up in the 5G chip division that is now part of Apple
- Wondermedia was spun out as the company to make ARM SoCs, which decent success in early Android tablets but never made it to 64-bit designs before they disappeared.
- Zhaoxin appears to have inherited the SoC business, both x86 and Arm chips, but is only minority owned by VIA
- Centaur's recently announced CNS chips look like they have the same heritage as Zhaoxin's ZX series but are now developed independently.
Calin - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
If I remember correctly, they had the USB controller of choice at the launch of USB 2.0.Before that, I think they had the first 100MHz FSB chipset in the days of Intel BX (i.e. Pentium II and Pentium !!!).
Haven't heard much of them since then.
pogsnet - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
Their last X86 chipset is in P4, it is where Intel and VIA had disagreements, since then Intel don't give license to make chipset for their chips. Though Intel offered ditch the x86 license to continue as chipset partner manufacturer but VIA declined.ICBM - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
Actually the Nano series proved to be superior to the Atom. I don't think the power savings was quite there, but it was close. Performance was overall quite better. They never got the press attention in my opinion, but at the time it was good option.We still run a dual core fanless model with pfsense for our main office.
Oxford Guy - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
VIA also made it possible for Agner Fog to expose Intel’s ‘Genuine Intel’ benchmark scam — by engineering its processor to be able to be seen by software as an Intel CPU.Soulkeeper - Sunday, November 7, 2021 - link
I don't fully agree that their chipsets were "the worst and buggiest".They actually had pretty good memory controller designs back in the socket A days.
Most of the problems and bad reputation came from the windows drivers never having been updated. I actually preferred via chipsets back then and kinda miss via fading into irrelevance. In many cases they were better than sis or ALi, in those days, and cheaper than the nforce, amd, or intel chipset boards.
I had high hopes that either via or transmeta would make a breakthrough in cpu design ... ohhh well RIP.
Alexvrb - Tuesday, November 9, 2021 - link
Actually, it depended HEAVILY on the chipset in question. Even with the latest beta drivers and BIOS, KT133 reliability was questionable, at best. Meanwhile, KT133A was rock solid. Ditto for the switch to DDR... the KT266 was dodgy. The KT266A was extremely reliable. After that, the KT333 and 400 were also pretty good, thankfully. There were a lot of good, affordable boards built on those chipsets. After that though... they started to fall behind the competition.danielfranklin - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
Is this literally just a way of ensuring the 3rd licence holder will always be unable to use it? Or be purchased by someone Intel doesn't want to have it?Would love to know what the state of the x86 licence is after this. If it achieved getting it out of circulation, seems like a cheap deal for Intel, and gets some engineers too!
Calin - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
If what I remember is correct, the x86 licenses can't be sold. If NVidia would really want the license to produce x86 processors, they might let themselves be bought by VIA (the other way around wouldn't work).Lord of the Bored - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
That was part of the AMD settlement, it is not part of the license.Via actually got their license by buying National Semiconductors' x86 division, which National got by buying Cyrix.
Lord of the Bored - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
And just to make things more complex, Cyrix got their license by suing Intel.Intel sued Cyrix for reverse-engineering the 486, and patent infringement. The courts said Cyrix was fine, and Intel licensed them the patents in question to make an antitrust suit Cyrix filed go away.
They got a full x86 license by suing Intel for patent infringement, claiming the P2 and PPro were ripping off Cyrix's power-management patents. Intel settled to make that one go away.
pogsnet - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
Wow! Never heard that. Though I live on that period of era already, I also tested Cyrix on that period, yes it is on par with Intel or maybe better than AMD.Igor_Kavinski - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
Chump change for Intel. They probably found some really talented engineers in the team and VIA has some sort of binding clause in their employment contract that won't let them quit and work for a competitor immediately. This is VIA's price for nullifying that contract. But it's also possible that this is an attempt by Intel to take away their most senior engineers, to make sure VIA don't become a threat to them anytime in the near future.Wereweeb - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
VIA isn't a threat to anyone. They're probably just dumping their x86 design team because they've seen the writing on the wall - with stiff competition from AMD in servers, and real competition from ARM-based SoC's everywhere (And in the future also RISC-V SoC's), VIA's x86 license and design capabilities are now worth essentially nothing.China probably also prefers having their own CPU architecture, so accessing VIA's x86 license through Zhaoxin will become an unecessary nuisance.
easp - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
None of which explains why Intel is paying so much.Moreover, if VIA really wants to be rid of it, Intel would be in a position to negotiate a much lower price.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
$125 million is a drop int he bucket for intel.And you forget how incredibly territorial intel gets over x86. The opportunity to reclaim one of the old forever licenses they were forced to hand out would likely be snatched up regardless of the price asked.I bet via could have gotten more, frankly.
dotjaz - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
But they are NOT reclaiming anything. VIA still has the license.Calin - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
There are no details on the deal (other than the price). This might be buried somewhere in the "small print".Regardless of how much they want to kill the x86 license of VIA, they wouldn't want everybody to know that there are even more choices to x86 than itself.
whatthe123 - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
we're in a tech bubble 2.0.money is raining down and $125M is chump change, surprised they didn't hold out for a billion.
webdoctors - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
In Silicon Valley, $125M is nothing. That's like the salary for a medium size team (100 eng) for 3-5 years and tapeout money. This is an extremely low price, the patents and engineers should be worth way more, probably a testament to how worthless x86 is seen going fwd.mode_13h - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
I'm pretty sure I've read about Chinese x86 CPUs that were heavy derivatives and then completely independent of Centaur's IP. And I'm not talking about Zhaoxin's Zen-based server CPU.SarahKerrigan - Saturday, November 6, 2021 - link
I think you're mixing up Zhaoxin, which uses Centaur microarchitectures, with Hygon, the AMD JV. Zhaoxin has never used Zen.jamesindevon - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
I can imagine competition authorities around the world insisting on more data.brucethemoose - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
WikiChip's writeup on the Centaur x86 SoC is definitely worth a read. Its looked quite promising to me, especially if they iterated on it.brucethemoose - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
Posting the links separately, in case the filter zaps them:https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveil...
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3256/centaur-new-x8...
defaultluser - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
This is the most confusing "Acquisition announcement I've ever read, but if it's for the entire division, that means VIA has lost 2/3 of the value it paid for (255 for Cyrix, plus 167 million for Centaur)Is Formosa Plastics finally tired of losing money yearly on VIA?
Kamen Rider Blade - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
Any Chance of nVIDIA buying the x86 license?TheinsanegamerN - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
0% chance. Intel wont let that puppy go. If there was a chance nvidia likely would have gotten a x86 license decades ago.coburn_c - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
If there is a regulatory body anywhere in the world that would let Intel and nVidia merge we should just give up now.at_clucks - Saturday, November 6, 2021 - link
The x86 license cannot be transferred so Nvidia buying up VIA wouldn't work. The x86 license belongs to VIA and VIA alone. Nvidia tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get into x86, then they realized (since before Denver times) ARM will do just fine.Lord of the Bored - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
The x86 license CAN be transferred, Via got it by buying Cyrix from National.del42sa - Tuesday, November 9, 2021 - link
more precise to say VIA could use it because they own Cyrixpogsnet - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
They [nvidia] wanted but Intel won't allow. Intel has still say on x86 license or buy VIA without x86 license.pogsnet - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
Intel always hate competition. They have many horns on their back but angel looking at front.ballsystemlord - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
So if Intel purchases the development team, that means that (without a dev team) VIA can't produce new x86 designs. Thus, Intel wins without buying the IP.WorBlux - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
I don't think this is about x86. I think it's about that NPU/ AI / inference accelerator. Intel wants an answer to Google/Apple's inclusion of an NPU on thier SoC (and potentially a tensor core in thier gpu). Via want's a better cpu to pair it with and intel can actually access Fabrication facilites (pretty hard for low volume/specialty chip producers tight now with TSMC or samsung)The Hardcard - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
I can’t argue that they don’t need more IP and engineers for that, but they have made several large purchases in that field recently. Nervana, Habana, Cnvrg.io, and SigOpt.The Hardcard - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
Maybe they could name the division Hella Lotta AIahtoh - Saturday, November 6, 2021 - link
I remember VIA 4 in 1 driverdel42sa - Sunday, November 7, 2021 - link
125million ? Quite cheap ...