VIA Insides: Wenchi Chen speaks up

"The improvement is in our new design"

tecCHANNEL: Are you planning to have the southbridges reworked? I think we haven't seen a major update there for the last 18 months, it's still the 686 design for most of your parts.

Chen: In this business there are many issues. When we got this input, we had our team analyze it and looking at what kind of effect it will have. But then we have many customers using our products. It's not easy for any major customer to check a new product, it takes a lot of validation work. But: The improvement is in our new design. In our future products, we will be thinking of this.

tecCHANNEL: And we're not talking about just another patch, are we?

Chen: No, no, no....

tecCHANNEL: We could sit here and talk about more exciting stuff if this was out of the world - at your press conference, VIA said that they want to make more than 50 per cent of their revenues with non-chipset products by the end of 2003. Why?

Chen: For a couple of reasons. Number one: We want to grow. We already are a really substantial chipset player. So, how are we going to grow, if chipsets are always more then 50 per cent of our business?

Number two: We do have a new exciting product lineup. We recently announced our "Project Canaan". We set off starting with five business units, and will add more business units. Besides the chipset business, we will also have 3D graphics, embedded CPUs - that's a very exciting product line! We have been attracting a lot of interest, even though the CPU business has not taken of as we would like to see it. In the past three years it has become very severe.