Industry Update - Q2-2005: Chipset wars, AMD's growing market share and more...

VIA

The word around Taiwan is that many of VIA's engineers have left as the company's chipset business is struggling.

All of the motherboard manufacturers that we've spoken to have agreed - VIA has seen much of its market share eroded because of the strength of NVIDIA's nForce3 and nForce4 platforms.  Currently relegated to low-cost Socket-754 and integrated graphics solutions, VIA isn't the AMD chipset provider that they used to be. 

The K8T890 chipset, VIA's first PCI Express Athlon 64 chipset, was announced to have full support for dual core Athlon 64s two months ago.  However, motherboard manufacturers are telling us now that the current revision of the K8T890 doesn't support dual core AMD CPUs properly and that a later revision of the chipset, due later this month, will add working dual core support. 

Luckily, no Socket-939 K8T890 motherboards will ship based on the current version of the chipset that we know of.  A few manufacturers have stated that they will be shipping Socket-754 motherboards based on the current chipset, but since there are no dual core Socket-754 CPUs, it isn't such a big deal. 

VIA has seen much success with their low power CPUs, however, and thus, they have put even more focus into selling these CPUs into emerging markets such as India and China. 

ULi

The saying in Taiwan goes something like this - "There are three Taiwanese chipset manufacturers (ULi, SiS and VIA) and only one of them is making any money - ULi."

ULi's business is profitable because they are only providing South Bridges and as such, they can piggy-back off of ATI's marketing by providing South Bridges to OEMs interested in using ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 chipsets.  Unfortunately for ULi, this isn't a very good long-term business plan as there will come a day when ATI's own South Bridges are perfected. 

ULi is therefore trying to make their way into the high-end chipset market, but with NVIDIA and Intel as the chief competitors there, it will be an uphill battle.  Many manufacturers expressed interest in ULi, but we will have to wait and see to find out if it actually translates into a viable competitor. 

SiS

Much like VIA, we haven't heard much from SiS.  They are producing the South Bridge for the Xbox 360 (as ATI could not supply the South Bridge for the console), but that's about all that's interesting.  SiS does have some good chipsets on paper, but as history has shown us, most motherboard manufacturers won't implement their chipsets in anything other than the lowest cost solutions.