Interview with Richard Brown, Marketing Director of VIA

During our visit to the VIA Technology Forum 2000 in Prague, Mr. Richard Brown, Marketing Director of VIA kindly devoted some time to answer our questions about the company's present and future.

Richard Brown, Marketing Director of VIA

HWSW: I'd like to start with some questions about your chipsets, because this seems now the main market for VIA with almost 50% of market share. VIA has introduced its DDR enabled chipsets lately, and we know that these chipsets will be shipping very soon. As far as I am informed, the DDR chipset for the Athlon/Duron platform, the KT266 will appear a month later than the Apollo Pro266 for the Pentium III platform. What's the reason for this?

Richard: It think it is primarily about resources. VIA is a big company, but when you're rolling out a lot of products you always have to set priorities. The customers are screaming that "I want the Pentium III version" and "I also want the Athlon version". I think we have to make sure that we get Intel Pentium III version out first and to be sure that it's solid, the performance is good, the reliability is good and then we can very quickly follow on with KT266.

HWSW: So do you say that Pentium III is now a larger market and that's why VIA will rolls out the Apollo Pro266 sooner?

Richard: Yes. I think that customer demand is very strong and obviously they want both. But the Pentium is a larger sized market than the Athlon and we have to service the needs of the market.

HWSW: During the summer, VIA announced High Definition Interconnect Technology. When will the first chipsets based on this technology be available?

Richard: The basic core of that technology is the DDR chipset. And then what we will be doing is building on that with adding, for example, a PCI-X controller or boosting the memory bandwidth. But I think during these chipsets will start to come out by the end of the first half of 2001.

HWSW: You mentioned PCI-X. Well, it seems to me that HDIT-based chipsets will be some kind of high-end chipsets targeted at high-end desktop and server processors and not for consumer products or hardcore gamers.

Richard: You are right. Well I'm sure hardcore gamers eventually will want to use them. But if you look at VIA now, we have nearly 50% of the market, and we have to know where we want to grow. Expanding our presence in the corporate market is very important, and to do this we need to execute very well on DDR. First of all with discrete and then very quickly with SMA solutions. Because we believe that the integrated graphics really benefits from the extra bandwidth of DDR. But the same time we have to move up. And I think you saw what happened to Apollo Pro133A, which is a dual processor version. Brands like Tyan are shipping dual motherboards, however it wasn't in our plan, but they said they want this. And that is what we're doing now. The first step is to get a mainstream chipset out and then move to the higher end.

[oldal:Part two]

HWSW: As to DDR enabled integrated chipsets, during the presentation Mr. Chang [Director of Product Marketing for VIA] said that VIA used the Savage4 graphic core in its chipsets because it made the best use of SDR memory bandwidth. If VIA introduces DDR enabled integrated chipsets, what kind of graphic core will be integrated into it?

Richard: We'll use the S3 Savage core as the graphics engine for our DDR chipsets. It provides the best balance of price and performance.

Mr. Eric Chang presenting details of the Apollo Pro266

HWSW: Intel has lately licensed the Pentium 4 bus technology to VIA to enable the company to produce chipsets for the Pentium 4 processor. Will these chipsets be DDR enabled or will they utilize the Rambus architecture?

Richard: We haven't signed anything with Intel, so we're still discussing this. But we have signed with them on Pentium III and it shows on both sides we need each other. And the relations are better. I think both sides want to come to an agreement on Pentium 4, but it's still not 100% confirmed yet. But I think all I can say that we don't do Rambus. I think the market has already sent a very clear message that it doesn't want Rambus. Our focus is on DDR.

HWSW: Will you company produce chipsets to support AMD x86-64 "SledgeHammer" processors?

Richard: I think it's too early to give any confirmations, but we work closely with AMD and we definitely follow their roadmap.

HWSW: Cyrix III processor with Samuel core was announced lately and I know that there is another product based on the Samuel 2 core. This processor has its L2 cache and 800 MHz speed and I think it can be boosted to even above 1 GHz. It seems to me rather a mainstream processor than the Samuel, which was targeted at the value segment.

Richard: I think the reality is that we focus on the value segment or the low-end. The time we'll have 1 GHz will be middle of next year, and if you look at Q1 Intel is pushing the low-end to 700 or 800 MHz with its Celerons. So the reality is you have to keep continuing to ramp up the MHz in order to keep up with the market. And it's like an entry ticket to the game to keep ramping up the MHz. Well, obviously we're keen on boosting the performance and we've got a good design and adding 64k cache will help and we improve the manufacturing process as well. The 1GHz chip it will be 0.13 micron.

HWSW: It seems to me that your 700-800 MHz processors will be aimed directly against Intel Celeron. What's the truth?

Richard: I have to be realistic, we target them to the Information PC market. There are two premium processor makers, that is Intel and AMD. And there's a value processor maker, which is VIA. It would be very nice to have a 1.5 GHz part to talk you about, but it's not our market segment.

HWSW: We have heard about the Matthew processor, which is an integrated product like Intel's Timna. And we all know that Intel has cancelled its Timna project. Will this move on the part of Intel affect the plans or features of the Matthew?

Richard: No. It has no effect on our plans with the Matthew. I think that the main problem with Timna was the Rambus-design and the MTH. In addition, for this kind of product you need a different business model to be successful. You need to price it very aggressively. It needs to be around 60-70 dollars, and then a question comes whether you can sell it or not and make a profit. I think Intel looked at the figures and said that this didn't make sense to their business model.

[oldal:Part three]

HWSW: Our site has a special section for 3DNow! enabled products. What efforts does your company make to get software developers support this instruction set?

Richard: Well, to be honest the major efforts we can do are to deliver reference systems. The code is exactly the same that is used by AMD. And AMD is driving 3DNow! more aggressively than we do.

HWSW: Will the enhanced 3DNow! features of the Athlon processors be implemented into VIA's upcoming processors?

Richard: We haven't finalized that yet.

HWSW: I'm really interested in your opinion about Bluetooth. What are VIA's plans with Bluetooth?

Richard: If we look at PC motherboards and we look into the next 2 or 3 years, we have to examine where the value is going to be added to the motherboard. The value is foing to move to how it connects. Whether it's standard V.90 modem, whether it's ADSL or 802.11 or Bluetooth, there are many different approaches on how to do that, I mean for example, ACR. Another possible solution is to put a Bluetooth chipset down on the motherboard, another possible solution is to integrate Bluetooth support into the south bridge of the chipset.

I'm not saying it's happening right now, but maybe in a year or two. It's a possible solution just as how we're doing now with 3Com chips on the networking side. Right now it's far too early to say what will be the most cost-effective way of integrating Bluetooth-support into a PC or into a motherboard. All I can say is that we're examining a lot of different alternatives. I think all the Bluetooth-guys are very anxious to get Bluetooth into the PC and to do that they will need to talk to VIA.

HWSW: And let me ask a personal question at the end. What kind of computer do you have at home?

Richard: Actually I do not have one. My kids have one. Right now I'm using a notebook. I travel so much that it doesn’t make sense anymore to have a desktop.

HWSW: Thank you for answering our questions, and we really enjoy being here with VIA.

Hilton Hotel, Prague: The venue of VIA Technology Forum 2000