This is a very very interesting article from the inquirer.
"MAKE OF THIS AS YOU WILL, but we heard from normally highly reliable sources at Computex last week that as recently as this time last year Via was seriously considering buying AMD. That would have been a masterstroke for Via CEO Wen Chi Chen if he could have pulled off the plan. Formidable obstacles -- no doubt in the shape of Jerry Sanders III as well as the sums of money that would probably have been involved -- might well have convinced Via that the time for such an acquisition was not ripe.
And it would also have pitched Via firmly against Intel, and catapulted it firmly into the worldwide CPU market. Although Via is a force to be reckoned with in the industry, the US seems to have something of a blind spot about the company, which is owned by mega Taiwanese corporation Formosa Plastics. Via has already used the acquisition vehicle to increase its presence in the marketplace, with multi-million dollar deals giving it a number of US firms and divisions including Centaur, Cyrix, a chunk of S3, a bit of LSI Logic and goodness knows what else. Such a bold stroke would have galvanised the industry. Three years ago, at an Intel Developer Forum, chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger told us that it was rightly paranoid about Via – more paranoid in fact than it was about AMD, widely perceived as its main competition."