Inside VIA: Beneath the Hull of WenChi's Ship

Q&A with WenChi

It is not normal in the least to be visiting a large company and have the CEO drop by just to say hi and answer any questions you may have. The Craig Barretts of the world are generally extremely busy and are thus mostly inaccessible by the majority of the population. Needless to say that it was a pleasant surprise when VIA's CEO unexpectedly dropped by our meeting and sat with us for a while to answer questions.

VIA's fearless leader - WenChi Chen

With Hammer being such a hot topic these days, I asked WenChi to list, in descending order, his picks for successful Hammer chipsets. Obviously he was confident that their K8HTA would be number one but other than AMD he said it was too early to tell as far as the other chipset manufacturers were concerned. We tend to agree since at this point only AMD and VIA have chipsets that have been demonstrated publicly.

In response to a growing threat from NVIDIA on the chipset side, WenChi made one of the most appropriate statements I'd heard in a while; WenChi responded with "Jen-Hsun has got to worry about K.Y. [ATI's CEO] more." ATI is getting much more competitive than they have with past products and with a strong hold on the mobile market, any gains in the desktop sector could worry NVIDIA.

Mike Magee of the Inquirer asked whether there were any plans for VIA to make a 64-bit processor of their own (obviously referring to licensing x86-64 from AMD). With a smile, WenChi responded "Yeah, why not."

With very close ties to the motherboard industry in Taiwan, WenChi echoed sentiments we've heard elsewhere about RDRAM as a viable PC memory technology. If anything, "Rambus was too early for its time" WenChi stated as he explained that the very competent technology does make much business sense at this point. VIA is still very much dedicated to the DDR roadmap with DDR333 going mainstream later this year and into 2003 and DDR-II hopefully taking over completely by 2004.

Although a number of graphics related announcements came out of the S3-VIA joint venture at Computex, none of them were particularly exciting. The graphics business is quite lucrative and it makes a lot of sense for a chipset manufacturer to dabble in it since the fastest growing sales are of chipsets with integrated graphics. VIA currently plans on becoming much more competitive in the graphics sector with the release of their forthcoming Columbia GPU, a DX9 part due out late this year. We've heard claims as wild as NV30-like performance out of Columbia when it ships but seeing that NV30 is little more than numbers on paper right now, it's quite simple to make such claims; when push comes to shove, it will be interesting to see whether Columbia ends up being the C3 of graphics chips or something that exceeds all expectations.

After our questions WenChi bid us farewell as he went back to work but his time spent would not go unappreciated. It's very rare that you see a CEO that's this in touch with the community that purchases their products and it's clear, now more than ever, that VIA is in good hands with WenChi.