

VIA Readying New Processor to Take on Intel Bay Trail and AMD Kabini - luu
http://www.techpowerup.com/mobile/202809/via-readying-new-64-bit-x86-processor-to-take-on-intel-bay-trail-and-amd-kabini.html

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Tralalak
VIA QuadCore U4650 CPU & VIA/S3G DirectX 11 iGPU mini user review source:
[http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2357358](http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2357358)

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rasz_pl
VIAs biggest problem is distribution and clinging to old corp culture.

They used to be a PC powerhouse supplying almost half of chipset market. Now
they are a niche survivor, dabbling in ARM SoCs and embedded computer
platforms (car PCs, the ones you can see mounted in a trunk of every police
cruiser). But they cant seem to understand they are nobody today. They keep
acting like Broadcom, requiring tons of NDAs, not delivering any
documentation, making problems when you want to buy moderate quantities of
their stuff.

Via could try to take over SoC market from the bottom up by simply being OPEN.
Instead they make half assed attempts from time to time like
[http://apc.io](http://apc.io) You know they are fucked if you cant even buy
their products directly from them (out of stock).

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ris
We've heard it all before, VIA.

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craigjb
Notice the power specs are missing from the table...

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voidlogic
Or the manufacture process

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sspiff
For the previous three generations (Via C3, C7 and Nano), I was always
impressed with what the underdog did - on paper. They never seemed to get out
there in the consumer market space.

I'm hoping - but not hopeful - this time will be different.

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i80and
The Nano looked _extremely_ impressive. I waited years for hardware to hit
shelves, and to this day the options are pretty much a null set.

I'd buy up an Isaiah II board in a heartbeat, of course, but one of the
biggest problems facing them in the consumer space (aside from all the
marketing issues) is graphics. Intel and AMD both have extremely high-quality
on-die graphics now, and to the best of my knowledge VIA cannot compete on
that front.

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voidlogic
I thought VIAs graphics package was decent and based on tech they got via S3?

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i80and
Hardly; they bought S3 after S3 realized they couldn't compete in 3D anymore.
As far as I can determine, the Chrome 645 is their top-of-the-line integrated
chip, which is absolutely blown out of the water[1] by even the anemic Intel
Sandy Bridge chips from three generations ago.

And let's not even _mention_ the driver situation...

[1]:
[http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=VIA%2...](http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=VIA%2FS3G+Chrome+645%2F640+GPU&id=1962)

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ibrahima
Haha, I got an S3 prototype card from a friend's dad who worked there once, it
was pretty awful. I think it was supposed to be around the performance level
of a Radeon 9600 but it really wasn't, and it was pretty crashy too (though to
be fair, he did say it was a prototype).

