VIA Technologies aims to ship as many as 5.5 million CPUs this year, up 50% from about 3.6 million last year, said Steven Lee, special assistant to VIA president Chen Wen-chi, yesterday following the company"s announcements of a new foundry partner, IBM, and the merger of its Platform Support Division (VPSD) and CPU divisions.
VIA currently has three CPU lines, all based on the company"s Nehemiah processor core and produced at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The C3 line is for desktop PCs, the Antaur for notebooks and the Eden for embedded solutions. By the second half of this year, VIA will add the new Esther processor core to its CPU lines. Esther is now being developed at IBM"s 12-inch East Fishkill, New York fab using 90nm SOI CMOS, low-k dielectric manufacturing technology, as reported yesterday.
The VPSD and CPU divisions are now being operated under a new VIA Embedded Platform Division (VEPD), responsible for CPU sales along with embedded motherboard solutions. Lee heads the new division. In chipsets, VIA aims to ship 40 million to 45 million units this year, compared with 31 million to 33 million last year, one high-level executive said.