Introducing VIA!

Who is VIA Technologies?

While many gamers are aware of companies such as 3dfx, NVIDIA, Creative Labs, and Diamond Multimedia, many are unaware of the components underneath their graphics card or processor. One of these components, the system chipset, is at the core of VIA Technologies business.

In short, the system chipset acts as a hub for all communications that occur inside your computer. Newer chipsets such as the VIA Apollo Pro133A and KX133 fully support 133MHz front side bus operation and AGP 4X graphics cards. These newer chipsets are still fully compliant with the 100MHz front side bus and AGP 2X graphics cards as well.

While chipsets have been at the core of its business, VIA recently entered the CPU market with acquisitions of Cyrix from National Semiconductor and Centaur Technologies from IDT. With chipsets and CPU's under their belt, VIA is widely regarded as a major competitor to Intel, placing them right up there with AMD.

With this in mind, we decided to ask VIA a few questions about its current and upcoming products as well as its plans for the future.

Before we get into the interview however, we should discuss VIA's products so you can become more familiar with the company.

VIA's Chipsets

With chipsets based on both the Socket 7 and Slot 1 platforms, VIA offers products for both Intel and AMD users.

In the Socket 7 market, VIA offers their MVP4 chipset. Like most chipsets, the MVP4 is a two-chip solution. Dubbed the North Bridge and South Bridge, as the name states the North Bridge is the chip located above the South Bridge; the North Bridge and South Bridge are found at the top and bottom of the motherboard respectively.

The chief responsibility of the North Bridge is the CPU interface; in addition, the North Bridge also has controllers for the AGP port, memory, and PCI bus among others. The South Bridge is responsible for the hard drive controller, USB controller, I/O controller, and any integrated sound devices amongst others.

The North Bridge and South Bridge interface with each other forming a common "path" all components within the system must follow with the North Bridge and South Bridge controlling the flow of information between the components within the computer.

In particular, the MVP4 supports bus speeds up to 100MHz, ATA-66 hard drives, and has an integrated 2D/3D AGP graphics accelerator.

While it has served the market well, it is beginning to show signs of age. We were interested to hear VIA's plans on future Socket 7 products, but lets go over some of their other offerings.