VIA releases new chipset for Ultra Mobile market

Thursday 03rd April 2008, 06:40:00 PM, written by Arun

VIA released a new single-chip chipset for the Ultra Mobile market on April 1st - it sports a DX9 IGP, a 64-bit DDR2 memory controller and the usual I/O capabilities. TDP is 3.5 to 5W, and the specs hint at why VIA is interested in NVIDIA's MCP79. In related news, VIA's had decent sales in March...

Data Points

• The new chipset, the VX800, will start shipping sometime in April 2008. It seems likely to still be manufactured on 90nm. Just like VIA's other chipsets, it will support both the C7 and Isaiah.
• Its only form of display connectivity is LVDS: it doesn't support VGA, DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort. That's a good design decision for the Ultra Mobile (UMPC/MID/Ultraportable) market, but it also means the chip isn't usable for desktop computers.
• VIA had sales of $35M in March, up from $29.5M in January and $21.5M in December (February is an outlier month due to the Chinese New Year so we don't consider it here). That's down 'only' 28.5% year-over-year, which is also an improvement.

Analysis

• This gives further credibility to the 'NVIDIA MCP79 for Isaiah' rumours; VIA's chipset team isn't big enough to be working on many projects at once, so it seems unlikely to have a decent desktop chipset in the wings.
• Furthermore, Windows Vista Premium certification will require DX10 support as of this summer; it seems even more unlikely VIA would have a DX10 IGP ready in the near future as VIA/S3's DX10 GPU only started shipping recently (although we'd love to be pleasantly surprised).
• Intel's desktop platform based on Silverthorne (for what Intel calls 'Nettops') is based on old 130nm chipsets, not Poulsbo; the 945GC + ICH7 combo draws up to 22W. So Isaiah + MCP79 might actually turn out to be more power efficient too, if the two companies are indeed working on such a combination...
• A potential custom for such a combo would be HP, as they have previously used VIA CPUs and are extremely NVIDIA-centric in terms of chipsets and, to a lesser extend, GPUs.
• VIA's financial results are a surprisingly good in March; we look forward to April and May to see if that's sustainable, or if it's just a temporary peak related to VIA's Intel FSB license expiring completely in April 2008. They already couldn't design new chipsets, now they won't be able to sell any either, so some partners might be stocking up to make sure they don't run out of inventory.

We look forward to seeing how Isaiah and its future revisions will turn out in the coming months and years. Thanks to Jawed on the forums for posting this chipset announcement.

Discuss on the forums

via ± vx800, isaiah, mcp79, 65nm, 90nm

Analysis: VIA strikes back with Isaiah: OoOE, Fast SSE3, 3.5 to 25W
VIA: Intel chipset license? What license?