These days VIA Technologies holds its annual VIA Technology Forum (VTF), where the company showcases the roadmaps, makes important announcements and introduces the new products. Pretty interesting to watch, so to say, because VIA now offers a very broad range of products that may not be intended for personal computers at all. For example, today VIA said that the company plan to launch a new RISC (reduced instruction set computing) architecture processor line in the first quarter of 2003. The newcomers are intended for handheld devices, such as PDAs and mobile phones.

The market of handheld devices is a new market for VIA, since currently it has nothing to offer there. As far as I remember, presently the company only has its Eden platform for portable and power-consuming sensitive devices. The performance of Eden is very low and the demand on such solution is not very high, according to some analysts. Next year the company will launch a more feature-rich North Bridge for Eden with MPEG2 decoding, 2D and 3D graphics accelerator and so on. As a result, VIA is going to be in more favourable position compared to its state at the moment.

I wonder where VIA has taken its RISC core from. As far as I remember, neither Cyrix nor IDT developed RISC processors in late nineties, hence, either VIA has licensed its from a third-party developer, or has developed on their own. In case VIA has really made a nice and successful RISC core, I can only claim that VIA’s diversification strategy brings its advantages and proves to be wise enough. On the other hand, it means that the company will not be so much committed to their chipsets in future.