SEEN this yet?
We had some inklings something like this was going to happen. It’s a case of unlikely bedfellows.
There was never any likelihood that Nvidia would buy Via, as Charlie D points out – that was Digitimes froth, of course. They did chat about licences and that a year or two back, but that wasn’t a goer.
Intel might resort to the legal stick, Charlie reckons – but if it does, it’s not entirely clear how that would work out. Larrabee and discrete graphic cards could alter the legal picture for Nvidia, we guess. Will be interested to see how this all works out. ♣
I don’t expect this VIA-Nvidia deal to shake the desktop PC market. I think there are many possibilities for cooperation beyond plain desktop PC chipset business.
To me it seams VIA’s C7 CPU will be transformed into a SOC (System-on-a-chip) in foreseeable future.
What’s nVidia’s hidden agenda here?
If one wants to sell chipsets, his/her business planning should start from the market size of VIA CPUs. The market for VIA’s CPUs is tiny compared to the competitors’. Therefore I think nVidia’s top interest couldn’t be just making chipsets for VIA CPUs.
At first, nV could allocate some of its idle engineering resources to VIA’s chipset development. That shouldn’t be a difficult task for them (and that’s way better than laying off engineers).
Semicon foundries count wafers they manufacture – more wafers, lower price for the ordering party. As soon as Nvidia get the chipset order from VIA, they could request better terms from semicon foundries. The manufacturing price of its own bread and butter products – GPU’s and Intel/AMD chipsets would be reduced significantly with greater volumes provided partly by chipsets for VIA CPUs.
Going further in future, nVidia could sell some IP and designs to VIA, from the broad portfolio of its graphics, physics, MP3 decoding and advanced audio logic. And if C7 is going to become a popular SOC, the missing parts could be easily provided by VIA.