VIA Insides: Wenchi Chen speaks up

"We did not get this kind of input"

tecCHANNEL: OK. When we met here last year, we were discussing a bug in your 686B southbridges, resulting in data losses. Then tecCHANNEL found out that there is something else wrong with the way you implement PCI.

Chen: Right.

tecCHANNEL: Last year you said that you will put in place new customer service practices, faster response times - how could it happen that we just found another bug?

Chen: This one is related to performance. It is not exactly related to product compatibility issues. We have been shipping this product and have a lot of people using it - we didn't get this kind of input. That's something we continue to learn from this business: There's always something new. We just need to continue to work harder. We need to continue to improve the quality, performance, all these kinds of things for our products.

tecCHANNEL: I'm sorry, Mr. Chen, but I have to disagree, it's not all about performance. We have been trying to communicate that to VIA for four months now: It's also a stability and a compatibility issue. When we published the story we had lots of feedback from readers, not only using RAID cards, but also using sound cards, where the sound was crackled up as soon as you had a constant stream of data. We then did an analysis of almost every other chipset by Intel, SiS, ALi, and your line of products is the only one that has this problem. We think, there is something wrong with the way you implement the PCI on the Southbridge.

Chen: We can argue if that's (a problem of, Ed.) performance, or not exactly performance. No matter what: I think that's something we need to deal with, and we need to work on. I don't think we need to argue, one way or the other, that doesn't really matter. In the end, the more important thing is: How to deliver a better product?