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| Tomorrow has Arrived...... Welcome to CALROG.COM! | Nov. '01 Headlines |
Via Technologies Playing Hardball in Chipset Market By C. Rogers, 11.01 (Edited 05.05) Since the Athlon was introduced in 1999, Via Technologies has been the near-dominant provider of chipsets for this platform. At first, chipsets for the initial K7 were pricey. However, as demand grew for Athlon motherboards, prices for chipsets drastically reduced. To this very day, it is east to find a modern Athlon motherboard running for under $99. Via saw no major competition in the Athlon motherboard market. With AMD themselves claiming to be a CPU manufacturer, and not an "official" maker of chipsets, Via was the de-facto standard for most segments of the Athlon chipset market. Some popular chipsets released by Via were the KX133 for Slot-A CPUs, KT133 for Athlon-Thunderbirds (supporting SDRAM), and the KT266 motherboard, the first solution to offer DDR memory support. While the newly-touted KT266 chipset was made available to the market, a quiet but burgeoning chipset from SiS Technologies made its debut. SiS is most noted for creating value-conscious motherboards, and offering low-end solutions. However, the SiS 735 chipset surprised the marketplace, becoming one of the fastest and cheapest Athlon mainboard solutions on the market. This chipset not only outperformed the Via KT266 by a noticeable margin- it also compared head to head with AMD's 760 chipset. This came as a blow to Via Technologies. No longer could they consider themselves the performance leader in the Athlon chipset business. Not more than a month after the SiS 735 chipset come released, a new chipset arrived on the market called KT266A. This new motherboard has "better memory timings" than the original KT266 chipset. Judging by the benchmarks posted by the KT266A chipset, it looks like Wen Chi Chen (Via's CEO) whipped his engineers into shape, wanting nothing but the fastest board made available to the market. As it stands now, the KT266A chipset is the fastest single-CPU DDR platform available today. One question that looms in some minds is the following: had SiS never released the SiS 735 chipset, would Via still be marketing their old KT266 chipset? The answer likely points to "yes". This shows that competition does prevail on the PC market, and that Via is sometimes forced to play hardball to retain authoritative rights. |
Via Technologies Playing Hardball in Chipset Market Nvidia Announces GeForce3 Ti 500 Linux Mandrake 8.1 Enters Fold CALROG.COM 2000-2001 Headlines.Copyright Info listed here. Thank you for visiting CALROG.COM, where we report the latest technology for the public throughout a monthly schedule. |
