Shares in VIA Technologies Inc (
VIA announced Thursday the introduction of two new Cyrix III processors running at speeds of 650 and 667 megahertz and aimed at "the value PC market segment," said Chen Wen-chi (陳文琦), president and chief executive officer at VIA.
Meanwhile, samples of its integrated processor known as "Matthew" will be released this month, with mass production scheduled to begin in the second quarter of next year, local media reported yesterday, citing a company official.
VIA's CPU strategy is to focus on the sub-US$500 segment of the PC market, particularly now that Intel Corp has canceled production of its Timna processor and VIA's major competitors in the processor market are concentrating more on higher end chips.
Intel canceled the long-delayed Timna processor, which was aimed at the budget PC market, at the end of September.
VIA's strategy might be necessary, analysts say, but its success was far from certain. Shares in VIA -- also a major chipset designer -- rose NT$14 to NT$221 following the announcement of the new processors.
"Eventually, integrated processors are going to be the future trend," said George Wu, an analyst at Taiyu Securities Co.
The Matthew processor combines VIA's chipset, graphics and processor technologies and is aimed at desktops, notebook PCs and information appliances.
However, "I don't the think the market's ready yet," Wu said.
Intel canceled Timna, which featured integrated graphics and a memory controller, because of development problems. It also said its customers preferred the flexibility of a stand-alone CPU, thus making Timna redundant.
VIA disagrees. "Future expansion of the PC market will be in the sub-US$500 segment, and to reach these lower price points, higher levels of integration will be essential," said Richard Brown, director of marketing at VIA in a recent interview with fullon3d.com.
"That's why we're moving ahead with our own Matthew processor combining our north bridge with S3 graphics and our Samuel processor core," he said.
VIA also believes it has a cost advantage in being a fabless chip designer. With the high costs of operating foundries, Intel had an incentive in canceling its Timna project and using the extra capacity to devote to more profitable chips, analysts said.
VIA is outsourcing the manufacture of its CPUs to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (
However, any cost advantage for VIA is likely to be limited, analysts said.
"Suppose Intel wants to make a very cheap CPU, they can book this order with TSMC, too," said Milton Huang, an analyst at National Securities Corp. "Further, since low-end CPUs are very old products for Intel, its costs should be low," Huang said.
Analysts also question the potential size of VIA's market share in the low-cost PC market segment.
"Its move into the low-end market is the right strategy," said Gary Lee, an analyst at International Securities Co. "But VIA wants 5 to 10 percent of the CPU market ... Intel won't give it so much market space," he said.
The introduction of the faster Cyrix III processors is significant in that VIA now has processors that can compete with Intel's Celeron processors in the low-end market, analysts said.
RSS