Editing VIA Technologies (section)

==Market trends==
{{update|date=May 2023}}
By 1996, VIA established itself as an important supplier of PC components with its chipsets for [[Socket 7]] platform. With the [[Apollo VP3]] chipset in 1997 VIA pioneered [[Accelerated Graphics Port|AGP]] support for Socket 7 processors.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port |title=Archived copy |access-date=9 August 2011 |archive-date=23 May 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200523223300/http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port |url-status=dead }}</ref> VIA's market position between 1998 and 2000 derived from the success of its [[Pentium III]] chipsets. Around 2001 [[Intel]] discontinued the development of its [[SDRAM]] chipsets, and stated as policy that only RDRAM memory would be supported going forward. Since [[RDRAM]] was more expensive and offered few, if any, obvious performance advantages, manufacturers found they could ship performance-equivalent PCs at a lower cost by using VIA chipsets.

In response to increasing market competition, VIA acquired the ailing [[S3 Graphics]] business in 2001. While the S3 Savage chipset was not fast enough to survive as a discrete graphics product, its low manufacturing cost made it an ideal for integration with the VIA [[Northbridge (computing)|northbridge]]. At the time under VIA, the S3 brand generally held about 10% share of the PC graphics market, behind [[Intel Corporation|Intel]] and [[Nvidia]]. VIA also included the [[VIA Envy]] soundcard on its motherboards, which offered 24-bit sound. While its [[Pentium 4]] chipset designs struggled to win market share in the face of legal threats from Intel, the [[VIA K8T800|K8T800]] chipset for the [[Athlon 64]] was popular.

In 2008, VIA left the support chipset business for Intel and AMD CPUs, claiming that the market for third party chipsets had all but disappeared and that they needed to concentrate on their own platform.<ref name='custompc_chipset' /><ref name='register_chipset' />

From 2004 to 2012, VIA continued the development of its [[VIA C3]] and [[VIA C7]] as well as other x86 and x86-64 compatible processors, targeting small, light, low power applications, a market space in which VIA continues to be successful. For example, in January 2008, VIA unveiled the [[VIA Nano]], an 11&nbsp;mm × 11&nbsp;mm footprint VM-enabled [[x86-64]] processor, which debuted in May 2008, for [[ultra-mobile PC]]s. By 2013 with its [[Zhaoxin]] joint-venture, VIA continued to create x86-64 compatible CPU designs derived from their 1999 purchase of Centaur Technologies and integrated-graphics systems, owing to VIA's earlier relationship and eventual 2001 purchase of S3 Graphics.