VIA has tacitly confirmed that it"s quitting the PC chipset business, claiming that there"s no longer a third-party chipset market worth the name. Richard Brown, VIA"s marketing chief, told Custom PC: "We believed that ultimately the third-party chipset market would disappear... That has indeed come to pass."
VIA"s perspective is that with Intel producing almost all the chipsets used with Intel processors, and with AMD increasingly the prime supplier of system logic for its own processors, there"s a rapidly narrowing space for third-party chipset makers. In VIA"s case, it appears it has decided the gap is now too narrow, and it"s getting out. At the very least, it saves it having to go to the expense of licensing Intel"s new QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) bus, set to debut with the giant"s "Nehalem" CPUs.