VIA Insides: Wenchi Chen speaks up

"Intel and AMD did a fantastic job"

tecCHANNEL: It's a battle...

Chen: In the past three years both Intel and AMD did a fantastic job on the CPU side. That has definitely been impacting our objective to deliver. But then, I think we found a good direction: Fanless CPUs. And then also a very big one is our CD-ROM, DVD and CD-RW product line. So overall, we see a lot of new opportunities.

tecCHANNEL: Are there any plans to do more on the communications side?

Chen: Any business that is big enough, we'll be interested in. We are in the component manufacturing and pride ourselves with high quality, high performance and low cost solutions.

tecCHANNEL: You are moving very fast with shipping the KT333 and already announcing KT400 and other DDR-400 products. Don't you think that's confusing for the customer?

Chen: I think that's the general problem we are facing. If you look at it for a long time: We moved our products according to the CPUs too much. When the CPUs move slow, we can afford to move relatively slow. Right now with the CPU moving so fast, in fact our chipsets and their memory bandwidth are still matching the CPU bandwidth. So, we need to continue to match up our chipsets to get some expansion in performance. Of course, this is pushing the whole industry - it's a challenge. We didn't realize it is going to be this fast.