VIA and the VIA Technology Forum

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VIA had quite a presence at Computex this year, and they had a lot to celebrate. The recent success of their K8 chipset solution and the recent demise of the Intel/VIA lawsuit spell better times for the once ailing chipset manufacturer.

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The VIA booth featured some cool things to look at including the largest wall of motherboards at the show. And what is interesting to note is that these boards only use the newer chipset from VIA: the K8T800 and PT800 and PT880.

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Also on display was the “Black Widow” system featuring a dual-Athlon 64 FX system on the MSI motherboard seen earlier. The case alone is quite impressive.

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VIA Technology Forum 2003

At Computex 2003, VIA held its own mini-show called VTF. Here VIA focuses on the segments of the market that work with VIA and it includes keynote speakers as well as a demonstration section.

Perhaps the most interesting keynote was Dr. Morris Chang, Chairman of TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). He had a lot of insights into the technology world that included Moore’s Law being hampered by funding and a 6 year cycle the semiconductor world seems to be going through of highs and lows.

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Another very informative keynote was from Terry Lee, of Micro Technology. His speech outlined the current and future status of the memory market, and included some interesting slides as well. I’ve included a few below:

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This slide shows a new memory subsystem that will allow for additional memory to be installed for larger applications and alleviate the need for higher and higher voltages for large memory masses. It is a point-to-point solution that uses hubs located on each memory module to independently direct memory “traffic” and alleviate the need for separate buses.

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This slide shows the past and projected future for number of MBs of memory for notebook, consumer and commercial systems. Notice notebooks are almost overtaking the consumer desktop market, and he sees in the future notebooks will eventually outnumber desktops and thus the notebook memory will increase at a faster rate.

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This slide shows off some advantages for the market in the switch to DDR2 technology.

Out at the technology demonstration room, I noticed a couple of video cards: one from NVIDIA and one from ATI. I don’t think these are anything special as far as the cores go, but the fact that they are using GDDR3 memory should be enough to be excited about.

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Overall, I’d say the VTF show this year was very informative and VIA showed again that their business, and that of their partners, is back on track in an upward movement and increasing pace.

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