Chipset designer VIA Technologies Inc (
VIA's new processor will fill the hole in the market between the Pentium III, now available at speeds of up to 1 gigahertz, and the Pentium 4, which is scheduled to debut on Nov. 20 and will run at speeds of 1.4 gigahertz, VIA's president said on Wednesday. Analysts were more skeptical and doubted whether the Samuel 2 will even come out on time.
"This gap should become the mainstream market for desktop PCs," said Frank Jeng, marketing manager at VIA. Analysts see the Pentium 4 as being used for more demanding products such as servers, and general-use computers upgrading to processors with speeds of about one gigahertz. "That's why we want to fill this frequency segmentation," said Jeng.
Advanced Micro Devices, Intel's major competitor in the processor market, released the 1.2 gigahertz Athlon and the 800 megahertz Duron microprocessors last month, but these use a socket that connects the processor with the motherboard that is different from Intel's processors. VIA's Samuel 2 uses the same Socket 370 platform as Intel.
"Our [Samuel 2] Cyrix III is fully compatible with the Celeron processor," said Jeng. Intel's Celeron processor currently runs at a maximum speed of 700 megahertz. Speed is a measure of a chip's processing power. Mainstream computers currently use processors running between 300 and 600 megahertz. "We can position ourselves in the same position as Intel and provide a more competitive price strategy," said Jeng.
On Wednesday, Chen Wen-chi, president of VIA, said that a window of opportunity had opened in the microprocessor market with the gap in speed between the Pentium III and Pentium 4. The price competitiveness of VIA's smaller-sized new microprocessor compared with the Pentium 4 added to this window of opportunity, Chen was reported as saying in the Digitimes, a local daily. VIA's Jeng later confirmed Chen's remarks.
Intel said last month that the Pentium 4 will become its primary processor in late 2001 or 2002 as production volume increases and prices fall. However, with no alternative -- initially at least -- but to pair with the more expensive Rambus direct random access memory, the Pentium 4 is expected to take longer to move down into the mainstream market. That could provide VIA's Samuel 2 with more time as the processor for low-end PCs.
Analysts weren't quite so positive. "I'd be skeptical with regard to their actually coming out with such a product," said Kristopher Thornton, vice-president of research at ING Barings in Taipei. "In terms of actually being able to deliver the technology, it'll be interesting to see if they can produce the processor," he said.
Even if VIA does get the Samuel 2 out on time, the company will have other issues to face. "They're going to have a difficult time getting into the CPU market, and proving they have a good product, and that they can survive," said Thornton.
VIA, the world's second largest chipset designer, expanded into the processor business only last year and introduced its Samuel 1 processor in June.
The new processor to be released at the beginning of next year is nearly twice as fast as the Samuel 1 and is installed with 64KB Level 2 cache memory. Cache memory makes overall operation faster by saving processors from accessing the computer's banks of memory chips.
The new processor will also be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC,
Further, by looking to move into a mainstream PC market whose growth is slowing, VIA's share of the processor market will be limited, said Wei.
"They will get a 6 to 8 percent share of the processor market next year," said Wei. "VIA had originally anticipated above 10 percent," he said.
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