VIA on NVIDIA nForce

French site INpact-Hardware.com is running an interview (in French and English) they had with Richard Brown, Marketing Director of VIA Technologies. Many topics are covered – Via Eden, chipsets, nVidia, war with Intel, the Mini-ITX – including a lengthy reply to a NVIDIA nForce related question (ouch!):

“INpact-Hardware : How will you position yourself on the integrated graphics market, with nVidia already being quite a big player with a comprehensive product portfolio ranging from graphics chipsets to audio, with performance features?

R. B. : I disagree with the assessment of Nvidia as ‘a big player’. Their only existing integrated graphics chipset, nforce ‘IGP’ (nforce2 IGP has not yet appeared in the market, 5 months after the so called ‘launch’) made little impact in the marketplace, as the solution was too expensive for the OEM market and performance/enthusiast market was obviously not interested.In contrast the VIA KM266 was shipped by the two biggest AMD shipping OEMs, HP and Emachines (Dell & Gateway do not do AMD based systems), in mass quantities through 2002, outselling nforce by a factor of at least 10 to 1 in the US market. In Europe, nforce gained more mindshare than in the US but again lost out in terms of volume by a significant degree. It’s very difficult to gain much market share without the support of customers like ECS who dominate the value/mainstream market. This is ignoring the fact that Nvidia’s presence is confined to the AMD market, while VIA have enjoyed considerable success in Intel based desktop and mobile integrated graphics chipsets for the past two years.

I don’t see this situation changing in 2003 as while Nvidia focus on cramming a 50 million transistor Geforce4 core into a chipset, the price point sweetspot will be hit by VIA CastleRock based solutions which provide the performance end users want, at a price point Nvidia can’t get near. As for audio, the market is either happy with a simple audio codec or will want to upgrade to a high quality 24-bit solution like a VIA Envy24 based audio controller. There is limited demand for a compromise solution like Nvidia’s 16-bit audio. Furthermore the motherboard implementation of Nvidia’s Audio solution is unlikely to provide the promised performance, as this is very dependent on the quality of the supporting codec and board implementation.

In some ways it’s helping us in the market as it just adds unnecessary cost to the Nvidia South Bridge, making VIA solutions more cost competitive. In terms of the future, the VIA Audio portfolio is far more advanced than Nvidia’s; after all, we have been shipping our 24-bit 96KHz Envy24 chip to high-end professional markets for over two years. We hope demand increases for high quality audio implementations, as VIA will be the big winner if that happens.“

Full interview: VIA : 2k2 Summary Interview ! @ inpact-hardware.fr
Full interview: VIA : Interview Bilan sur [IH] ! @ inpact-hardware.fr

source: email – INpact-Hardware.com