NVIDIA and VIA to be partners?
Talks of NVIDIA preparing to buy-out VIA Technologies have been buzzing around the Interweb for the past few weeks, only to have been waved away by NVIDIA due to VIA's high asking price.
So, what next for NVIDIA? Well, it's common knowledge that the California-based manufacturer is in need of an x86 license, in order to compete with Intel and AMD on the CPU front. NVIDIA's relationship with both Intel and AMD is, rumours say, at an all-time low and in order to secure its future, NVIDIA is clearly looking for a partner.
That partner, it seems, is likely to be VIA Technologies, for whom it is believed NVIDIA could produce IGP-based chipsets to work with VIA's upcoming Isaiah chips.
Though VIA already has its own graphics subsidiary, S3 Graphics, it doesn't yet offer graphics products that are seen to compete with NVIDIA's or AMD's solutions, despite the launch of its new Chrome 400 Series.
The NVIDIA-VIA partnership would provide VIA with some high-end graphics technology as it prepares to launch its 64-bit processor architecture, Isaiah.
Wenchi Chen, President and CEO of VIA Technologies hailed Isaiah as an "extremely significant milestone in VIA’s processor business". Its power-efficiency, performance and scalability are said to compete alongside Intel's Atom in portable devices.
No official statement has been issued by either NVIDIA or VIA, but could this be the partnership that both companies want, or, indeed, need?
