Via Technologies, the company that used to be one of the world’s leading developer of core-logic sets a little less than a decade ago, said in an interview that the market of third party chipsets compatible with microprocessors by Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corp. would ultimately disappear.

The Taipei, Taiwan designer of central processing units (CPUs), chipsets and graphics processing cores has quit the business of AMD- and Intel-compatible chipsets already in order to concentrate on development of its own platforms as well as x86 chips. The decision did not seem to be logical when it was made about a year ago, as Via’s revenues seriously depend on sales of chipsets for processors by others. However, Via is now confident that the choice was the right one.

“One of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear, and we would need to have the capability to provide a complete platform,” said Richard Brown, vice president of corporate marketing at Via Technologies, in an interview with Custom PC web-site.

According to Mr. Brown, both AMD and Intel sooner or later will provide chipsets for their processors exclusively.

“Intel provides the vast majority of chipsets for its processors and, following its purchase of ATI, AMD is also moving very quickly in the same direction,” Mr. Brown said.

The sunset of third-party chipsets for AMD and Intel CPUs means that both Nvidia Corp. and Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. are set to quit the market of chipsets, just like Via Technologies. Nvidia recently denied such possibility, but since both leading designers of microprocessors are aggressively promoting their chipsets, neither Nvidia, nor SiS, may not have a choice.