VIA Technologies
More info
- Released
- 1987
- Type
- Semiconductor company
- Website
- via.com.tw
Taiwanese chip designer whose motherboard chipsets sat inside a large share of the world's budget PCs in the 1990s.
VIA was founded in California in 1987 and soon moved to Taipei. Its bread and butter was motherboard chipsets for Intel and AMD processors, usually cheaper than Intel's own. In 1999 it bought both Cyrix and Centaur Technology, becoming the third x86 licensee, a position that turned out to be worth more than the processors themselves.
The VIA C3 and its successors sipped power and performed accordingly. To give them somewhere to live, VIA introduced the Mini-ITX form factor in 2001, which outlived the chips by a wide margin and now turns up in home-built NAS boxes everywhere. The x86 licence lives on in Zhaoxin, a joint venture with the Shanghai city government set up in 2013.