Santa Raids VIA Tech For Open-Source Presents

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Santa Raids VIA Tech For Open-Source Presents

Here's a very unexpected but welcoming surprise for the holidays: there's some source code that's about to be released by VIA Technologies...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAzMjI

[Nille]

I believe it only when I see it. VIA and has lied too many times.

[allquixotic]

Their hardware is terrible, though. All around, VIA is a loser company. I expect them to get bought or bankrupt themselves in the next couple years. They offer nothing unique except that you can buy an underpowered, buggy motherboard or GPU for only about 75% of the cost of a low-end Radeon or Intel motherboard with an Intel IGP. 25% cheaper for something like 5x slower? No thanks...

To survive as a retail chip-maker, you've got to at least have one killer product.

Intel has many profitable businesses, but their best is probably the x86_64 desktop and server motherboard chipsets and CPUs.

AMD has the ATI business along with a limited amount of customer loyalty from certain types of people, and that's kind of it. But Radeons are cost-effective, low-power and high-performance enough to be genuinely useful and competitive, and the drivers (proprietary at least) are definitely looking good these days.

Nvidia has a huge amount of momentum as being the Microsoft analogue to gaming GPU hardware; that is, they're pretty much what society considers the "gold standard", and everyone pretty much accepts that (except AMD fans).

Imagination has their SGX cores, which power dozens of models of tablets and smartphones. They've really cornered that market by producing an amazing blend of low-power and high-performance, with great support for GLES 2.0.

Hell, even Matrox has something unique; their graphics adapters can power up to 48 monitors!

What does VIA have? Crap hardware that you can get for the same price as a mid-grade previous-generation Radeon on-sale at Amazon?

I just want to know how VIA has survived the 2000s and is now still a solvent company in December 2011. I thought they'd be long gone by now. Who is buying their crap? Or do they simply stay afloat on patent royalties, like SGI (well, now a part of HTC) does?

[Veerappan]

Their hardware is terrible, though. All around, VIA is a loser company. I expect them to get bought or bankrupt themselves in the next couple years. They offer nothing unique except that you can buy an underpowered, buggy motherboard or GPU for only about 75% of the cost of a low-end Radeon or Intel motherboard with an Intel IGP. 25% cheaper for something like 5x slower? No thanks...

To survive as a retail chip-maker, you've got to at least have one killer product.

... snip ...

I just want to know how VIA has survived the 2000s and is now still a solvent company in December 2011. I thought they'd be long gone by now. Who is buying their crap? Or do they simply stay afloat on patent royalties, like SGI (well, now a part of HTC) does?

If I remember correctly, VIA has moved most of their marketing and sales into developing markets where cost is a more important factor than absolute performance.

[lepetit]

freedesktop

hi, now the code as moved to freedesktop.org

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/openchrome/xf86-video-openchrome/

[AlbertP]

25% cheaper for something like 5x slower? No thanks...

VIA Nano 3000 single-core can easily beat a single-core Atom while consuming only a bit more power. I haven't yet seen figures on the dual-core side but I don't expect things to be very different. And Chrome9 HD graphics on Windows 7 is as fast as Sandy Bridge in benchmarks.

By the way, VIA introduced an HD video capable chipset, VX900, in March 2010, long before Intel released a HD video capable Atom platform (Cedar Trail in December 2011). And the PowerVR graphics used by Intel does not even have any proper open-source support - VIA at least released some documentation on the VX900 hardware.

The main problem with VIA is the lack of interest from computer and motherboard manufacturers. Intel or AMD are well-known, an Atom or Fusion computer just sells better because of the brand name.