Interview with Tiziano Albani, European Business Development Director of VIA

[Fottemberg]

Hi guys, another interview here (english language).

http://www.bitsandchips.it/9-hardwar...di-via?start=2

There are a lot interesting assertions, mainly about the Mobile market.
One in particular: "When we first launched ARM boards into the embedded market, many of our customers saw them as low cost alternatives to existing x86 boards but they quickly found that they could not be used as direct replacements. As a general rule, x86 is great for general purpose computing platforms whereas ARM is great for low power application-specific systems such as smart phones, tablets, and set top boxes".

So, can we say that the Atom SoCs will lose the Mobile war?



Previous interviews:
Oliver Baltuch, President at Futuremark
Jerry XIA, Market Manager of AnTuTu
Tamas Miklos, Lead Developer of AIDA64

[Kai Robinson]

Okay...VIA used to make stuff and sell it. I've not seen anywhere that sells anything they make in years. They apparrently make/made a half-decent, low power alternative to the AMD Brazos & Intel Atom - the Nano/Nano X2. Even seen a benchmark on Anandtech, but never seen a single board for sale. It's as if all they do, is showcase concept stuff or vapourware.

[Fottemberg]

VIA sells by its own online store.

However, VIA is doing very well, as we see by the month revenues YoY (In thousands of US dollars):
Feb. 2013 -> 249
Feb. 2014 -> 545 (+118%)

http://www.via.com.tw/en/resources/p...elease_no=7647

So I think that VIA has understood very well the Mobile and Embedded markets. Benchmarks are useless in Embedded and Mobile markets. Thay have to focus on price/support ratio.

[jogshy]

VIA should make a decent desktop GPU to compete vs AMD/NVDA
I remember the good old times with S3-Savage ...

[zanzabar]

Okay...VIA used to make stuff and sell it. I've not seen anywhere that sells anything they make in years. They apparrently make/made a half-decent, low power alternative to the AMD Brazos & Intel Atom - the Nano/Nano X2. Even seen a benchmark on Anandtech, but never seen a single board for sale. It's as if all they do, is showcase concept stuff or vapourware.

via does not sell to consumers, they basically sell bulk orders to people who make things like ATMs and those annoying video players on gas pumps. they also make a couple audio chipsets that get used in pro audio equipment and set top boxes.