Inside VIA: Beneath the Hull of WenChi's Ship

VIA's Challenges

VIA's roadmap and future products have been openly discussed at Computex leaving us with the task of pointing out the challenges VIA must face going forward; after all, in order for a product to be successful you've got to consider every reason that it would fail. There are many more competitors in the chipset market today than VIA has been used to in the past couple years and getting into other markets like Audio and Communications have their own challenges as well, let's take a look at just some of the things VIA will face as a leader in the PC industry.

Branding is a major issue that VIA still faces; VIA is still branded as a second tier manufacturer when it comes to quality and reliability, most of which happens to do with issues that they've faced recently. The South Bridge problems contributed significantly to VIA's present day image as well as leftovers from the old Socket-7 days.

VIA's motherboard line also faces a branding problem; when you see an Intel motherboard you pretty much know that although it won't be an extremely feature rich solution, it will be solid as a rock. In order for VIA's motherboard line to be successful, the same image has to apply and it must be backed by similar stability. Intel is quite open with their validation practices and the tests they run on all of the hardware they ship out, VIA should do no less and ensure that their validation processes are not inferior in any way. To VIA's credit, their motherboard line does carry a much longer warranty than any other Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer (5 years vs. 1 year) which is an indication of build quality and confidence in the quality of their products.

Intel and SiS are also challenges that VIA must face going forward, mainly because of the legal issues surrounding their Pentium 4 chipset. Intel will do whatever it takes to ensure that the major motherboard manufacturers won't produce P4X based solutions, meanwhile allowing SiS to make significant gains in the Pentium 4 market. If you combine that with the lower cost of SiS chipsets because of the fact that SiS is the only chipset manufacturer (other than AMD and Intel) that has their own fab plant, VIA does have some issues to face here as well. As you may have heard elsewhere, ASUS will be introducing a new motherboard brand that will produce low cost motherboards to compete with ECS. Because of very aggressive pricing (made possible in part by their fab), most of those motherboards will feature SiS chipsets which will be a thorn in VIA's side due to the sheer amount of volume ASUS will be dealing with through their new brand.

Creative Labs will be the source of some headaches for VIA as the tough marketing of their Sound Blaster line will definitely hamper the success of VIA's Envy24HT solution. From a purely technical standpoint VIA's Envy24HT has potential (output quality should be good courtesy of its 24-bit 192KHz DACs) but the reason for Creative Labs success isn't technology, it's strong marketing.

Finally we have NVIDIA, but echoing WenChi's sentiments, you'll see much more competition with ATI than with VIA.