Inside VIA: Beneath the Hull of WenChi's Ship

VIA's Future

We bring our look inside VIA to an end with some words about the future. VIA's future lies in much more than just chipsets which is exactly what they must do in order to grow. There are a number of areas that VIA will be expanding to in the future and their success in these ventures will determine their overall success as a company.

First and foremost is graphics; graphics development is extremely important to any chipset manufacturer because of the incredibly high OEM demand for shared memory architecture (SMA) solutions (aka chipsets with integrated video). VIA has milked the Savage 4 core for all of its worth (much like Intel did with the i740) and now it's time for them to either get with the times or watch their market share erode. Luckily it seems as if VIA is more than interested in keeping up with the times and their Columbia GPU, when launched, should give us an idea of their potency in the graphics business.

A big focus at Computex for VIA was their new Envy24HT audio chip; this brings us to the second focus of VIA's future which is audio and multimedia in general. Technologically, VIA has what it takes with the Envy line of processors and their partners to make their audio business quite successful. But as we all know, it takes much more than good technology to make a product successful. In the end, the determinant of VIA's success in audio will be marketing. If done right, VIA could be in the powerful position of now being able to sell both chipsets and audio solutions to motherboard manufacturers.

The final focus for VIA in the future will be communications technologies. We've seen a bit from them already with various networking controllers but going forward you can expect VIA to become much more heavily involved in communications devices. By the end of next year you can expect VIA to have successfully integrated wireless networking (ala Springdale) into their South Bridges and going forward we'd expect them to build their communications portfolio.

Of course you can't ignore VIA's two primary businesses at this point - CPUs and chipsets, both of which will continue to grow as VIA does.

We hope you enjoyed this look inside VIA and be sure to check out our first article in the Inside series - Inside Intel. Up next will be ATI from our visit to them a few weeks ago…