Intro and general questions
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Richard Brown, Director of Marketing at VIA Technologies Inc! We have thrown a good amount of questions covering many aspects of VIA and Richard was kind enough to give us detailed answers to all. Well, almost all, that is... :). So, if you are ready for broken NDAs, leaked gossips, the fastest cars, naked women, nasty politics and some explanation of economic trends in the worldwide oil industry, besides the full picture material of the coming Computex...
Richard Brown, the One with all answers :)
... well, have a drink, take a deep breath and relax. You will still like this interview. The evil guy asking the uncomfortable questions is Marton Balog of PROHARDVER.HU, but we figured that it is the best not to show his (my... I am the censor) photo to make sure noone leaves the article at this point :). So, let's check out the questions, which are typed boldface and the cool answers which do not bear any special characteristics (so as to compensate that the answers are that count :)). We will cover VIA chipsets, mainboards, CPUs and some other hot stuff.
Please tell us about the company VIA. When was it formed, what were and are your main goals, where are you heading?
VIA was established in 1989 and is a fabless semiconductor design house based in Taiwan. We are a leading player in the core logic chipset business, but also offer a variety of different products including VIA C3 processors, S3 Graphics controllers, and multimedia, networking, and communications chips. Most recently we have also begun building our own motherboards, including innovative, highly integrated new mini-ITX.
Hirdetés
VIA chipsets were considered to be somewhat slower, less compatible and of lower quality than that of Intel's, for instance. However, this has drastically changed in the past years, VIA chipsets are now one of the most advanced, high performance and well-designed solutions. Could you briefly describe the progress that is responsible for the change? Which was the first chipset that VIA is "very proud of"?
As some of our newer competitors are beginning to learn, it takes a long time to learn about the chipset business. Our goal has always been to improve with each product generation, and I believe we have been successful in that. People really started taking notice of our chipsets when we launched the first PC133 chipsets for both socket 370 (694X) and then Slot A and Socket A (KX133 then KT133). It's difficult to say which chipset we are really proud of, because each generation keeps getting better and better. My own personal favorite is the KT266A; we took a lot of people by surprise when we launched that on the market.
VIA's hot & new favourite
Naturally the newest product - KT333 for Socket A and P4X333 for Socket 478 - are most technologically advanced, offer premium performance and great stability. As I mentioned before, our chipsets are getting better and better all the time.
Do you plan to build your own fab? What are the advantages/disadvantages of such a decision?
No. Our expertise is in silicon design. Being fabless allows us to very flexible and efficient, and we have very good partners with world leading technology such as TSMC.
Please evaluate your current position in the chipset, mainboard and CPU market. Also, please tell us where you plan to see yourself in one year from now.
VIA is undergoing a fundamental change. From a single-product company, we are expanding into several other fields. As you remember, recently we announced the Canaan project, which basically means that we are diversifying in many other directions apart from core logic chipsets. We have successfully entered the processor and mainboard businesses and soon we should show much greater activity and new product launches in the networking, communication, and storage and multimedia fields. These are fast growing and high-margin products. By the end of 2003 we are planning to get 50% of the revenue from products different than core logic chipsets.
Chipsets
The eternal race: Intel versus AMD. What do you see and why in each market? To which market are you focusing, which of them has a more profitable future in your opinion?
The processor market is extremely interesting right now. Intel in particular is pushing up clock speeds very quickly, and will be at least 3GHz by the year-end while AMD is working on the Hammer with its integrated memory controller. Both approaches will of course lead to higher and higher performance. What concerns me though is that despite all these increase in clock speed, the overall market is very slow right now and consumers and businesses seem less and less willing to pay a premium for this entire extra horsepower. The problem is that there are very few - if any - applications out there to take advantage of it. We've been pleasantly surprised by the reaction we have received to our low power VIA Eden mini-ITX platform. You get the feeling that many people are now looking for something different from their computers. Sure, they want adequate performance, but at the same time other factors such as low noise and smaller form factors are becoming more important.
SiS is probably your number one competitor, besides Intel. They had some "deep sleep" for years, however, with the SiS 645, 650, 645DX and the SiS 745, they made quite a comeback. Do you see them as a possible threat to your Pentium 4 / Athlon solutions? How do you plan to counter them?
Right now the chipset market is becoming more and more competitive, and to stay ahead we need to continue to deliver products with leading-edge features and performance. We have a very solid track record in that regard, and are confident that we can continue to maintain our position in the market.
Not only SiS, but Intel is progressing very fast. After the much debated RDRAM chipsets, Intel 845D is gaining popularity, and Intel 845G/GL/GLL will be launched at very good prices (at least for Intel). How are you planning to counter Intel?
As I mentioned in my answer to the previous question, this business is getting increasingly competitive, and we have to continue to improve our products to retain our leadership position in the chipset market. While the 845D is certainly very popular, we are now moving ahead with our P4X333 - which is delivering some great performance numbers. From what I've read on the web, Intel won't have a comparable solution until September at the very earliest.
Another key point that is worth mentioning is that the real battle this year is going to be in the South Bridge. The integration of faster I/O controllers (USB 2.0 and 1394 FireWire), wireless (802.11b and Bluetooth), faster drives (ATA/133 and Serial ATA) is becoming most important. We recently launched our new Southbridge VT8235, which is the first solution on the market to integrate both USB 2.0 and ATA/133. It is also ready to support Serial ATA and 802.11b in the future, whenever these technologies are mature enough. So here again, we are ready to answer the demand from the market in terms of connectivity.
Could you tell us something about the licensing dispute between VIA and Intel, regarding the Pentium 4 bus? SiS has agreed to pay and it seems as if one of the biggest complaints about the P4X266/A is the lack of the license from Intel, as the chipsets perform admirably otherwise. Isn't VIA at a disadvantage because of this?
Unfortunately we can not comment on that at this moment.
ATi and nVidia: are they worthy competitors in the chipset market now? And in the future?
While I would never underestimate Nvidia, they have had a lot tougher time gaining traction in the chipset market than they'd originally expected. Their initial integrated chipset was way too expensive, and its performance didn't match the hype they had created. Now they are aggressively promoting their DDR266 solution, while we have moved on to DDR333 with the KT333. So as long as we continue to execute on the product side I am sure we can retain our leadership position.
ATI have even more to prove than Nvidia on the chipsets. While they've announced their intention to do chipsets, we haven't seen any real product yet and I think it's going to be very tough for them to execute on the desktop side. When ATI made their announcement at CeBIT, many of the motherboards they showed even featured a south bridge from VIA! That has to make you wonder how ready they really are with their products.
Which is your most and least profitable chipset?
That's a very interesting question... (laughter) But unfortunately I can't answer it.
Please tell us something about what's cooking in your lab!
The next chipset we are planning for Intel Pentium 4 platform is P4X600, targeted at the workstation and entry level server segments. If features dual channel memory support and will also support 64-bit PCI through our forthcoming VPX-2 companion chip. On the integrated side, we are developing P4M333 chipset, which would enable DDR333, AGP 8X and a faster V-Link 8X support; and most importantly it would integrate a new graphics core - Zoetrope.
We are also working on both integrated and discreet solutions for upcoming AMD Hammer processor, but unfortunately cannot talk very much about those at the moment.
Eden, VPSD, C5X and the bonus question
How is your VPSD doing? Could you provide us with some statistics about how much mainboards you sell through VPSD for each platform?
As you know VIA has all building blocks for building a perfect platform: from chipsets, through networking, communications and multimedia chips, up to innovative wireless communication solutions. We are in unique position to deliver all platform components, and therefore we are able to present unique and technologically advanced solutions.
We are slowly building up our presence as the platform provider and creating our local channels for our motherboards. So far the business has gone very well, and as we continue to deliver even more advanced products to the market I am sure that business will continue to grow rapidly.
We are really excited about the Eden platform; it seems to fit in a special market niche perfectly. How did the market accept Eden? Are you satisfied with the results? What will "Eden 2" look like?
The feedback from the market after we announced the new Mini-ITX form factor was tremendous. We received inquiries from all around the world, both from distribution and OEM channels. As the result VPSD launched the EPIA Mini-ITX mainboard, which we are shipping now. Our initiative also found support in the industry partners - we recently announced that Biostar and Jetway will be producing their own versions of Mini-ITX, while Yeong Yang, Chenbro, Morex and G-Alantic developed small and fanless cases for our form factor.
VIA EPIA: Eden, mini-ITX.
Our customers have begun to build more and more exciting devices based on EPIA Mini-ITX platform. These devices include quiet and fanless small form-factor desktop PCs, energy-efficient blade servers, network terminals or even Desk PCs - PCs integrated into the desk, which we expect will find place in education institutions or libraries.
In the future we are planning a more multimedia-oriented version of the platform, which will be using a more advanced chipset featuring a much improved multimedia and video performance. This product would be ideal for home multimedia centers, and we will be announcing it at Computex.
Why don't we see any KT266/A and KT333 boards from VPSD?
The idea of VPSD is to deliver innovative products to the market, which would be different in terms of features than the competitive products, at the same time providing leading levels of stability and performance. As we can see many Socket A solutions based on KT266/A and KT333 chipsets, there is very little space for innovation in this market segment and we could not bring a unique product to the market. Socket 478 brings us more opportunities in terms of innovation, as does the mini ITX platform.
Could you give us a brief roadmap of your coming processors? How are you progressing with C5X?
We're now shipping in volume at 933MHz, but obviously would prefer to be at speeds higher than 1GHz - that will happen in the second half of this year.
Fanless PC? If C3 won't do, nothing will!
We'll also be rolling out our next generation Nehemiah processor (the core name is indeed C5X) this year, so we do believe that we can remain competitive at the entry level, in particular in low power, low noise applications. As for the features, Nehemiah will include 128kB L1 and up to 256kB L2 cache, two SSE units, and will deliver much improving multimedia and floating point performance. We should be sampling this processor in the middle of the year, with mass production scheduled at the end of this year.
There were many gossips about VIA and ST Microelectronics cooperating on the graphics market in one way, or another, through PowerVR's Kyro series graphics chips. Could you briefly sum up what's happening and what we should expect from VIA in this area?
The Kyro technology is certainly very interesting, and we are continuing to evaluate it. At the same time, however, S3 Graphics is executing very well on its roadmap and will be introducing its new low power Zoetrope core very shortly. This will be the first step in achieving our long term objective of returning to the mainstream graphics market.
Bonus: please tell us something about a product you have never told anyone before.
Not many people know that we are a leading supplier of high end studio quality audio chips, which are sold under the IC Ensemble Envy24 brand name and used by leading companies like Terratec and Midiman for a wide range of applications. We believe that improved audio performance will become an increasingly important factor for users of PCs as they download more digital media content and play it on their machines, and we have an exciting new range of audio products that we will be introducing very soon onto the market.
Here is a boxed C3 for all of you that got this far... :)
Richard, we here at PROHARDVER.HU would like to thank you for your time and wish you and VIA all the best in the future! VIA's progress in the recent years was nothing short of amazing, we sincerely hope you can keep up the great work and get used to people expecting only the best from VIA. We would also like to thank Michal Lisiecki, Marketing Manager of Central/Eastern Europe at VIA for his support and enthusiasm that made this interview possible.
