VIA Readying New Processor to Take on Intel Bay Trail and AMD Kabini
techpowerup.com
techpowerup.com
They used to be a PC powerhouse supplying almost half of chipset market. Now they are a niche survivor, dabbling in ARM SoCs and embedded computer platforms (car PCs, the ones you can see mounted in a trunk of every police cruiser). But they cant seem to understand they are nobody today. They keep acting like Broadcom, requiring tons of NDAs, not delivering any documentation, making problems when you want to buy moderate quantities of their stuff.
Via could try to take over SoC market from the bottom up by simply being OPEN. Instead they make half assed attempts from time to time like http://apc.io You know they are fucked if you cant even buy their products directly from them (out of stock).
I'm hoping - but not hopeful - this time will be different.
I'd buy up an Isaiah II board in a heartbeat, of course, but one of the biggest problems facing them in the consumer space (aside from all the marketing issues) is graphics. Intel and AMD both have extremely high-quality on-die graphics now, and to the best of my knowledge VIA cannot compete on that front.
And let's not even mention the driver situation...
[1]: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=VIA%2...
No clue if they improved their graphics as well for this iteration.
They really should have acquired (or be acquired by) a vendor of decent embedded graphics (Imagination or Qualcomm?), but at this point there's very little chance of that still happening. They already sold S3 to the closely linked HTC I believe.