VIA: Intel chipset license? What license?

VIA has denied rumours according to which they have successfully negotiated a new chipset license with Intel, as their current one has expired on April 7. Assuming these rumours are indeed incorrect, they may no longer design new Intel chipsets, and will need to stop selling their existing line-up in as little as one year.

This is especially important because if VIA is forced to quit the Intel chipset market, their economies of scale for the chipset business in general would diminish, and potentially make them quit the AMD chipset market too. VIA also designs sound and WiFi chips and, more importantly, x86 CPUs (such as the VIA C7) through their Centaur division. These CPUs are targetted at the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) space and the embedded sector.

Another key problem for VIA is that there is fundamentally no company left which might be interested in acquiring their chipset division, or at least their engineers most specialized in that area. AMD is not in a financial position to do so, while NVIDIA (which recently acquired ULi) and Intel already have highly crowded divisions of their own to say the least. It would thus seem more likely to us that a company would be interested in acquiring VIA as a whole, rather than just one of their divisions.

The other remaining chipset designer located in Taiwan, SiS, has recently confirmed that they have obtained a FSB1333 license from Intel. It seems that their relationship with Intel tends to be better than VIA's, however, and it will thus be quite interesting to see where things go from here.