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Let’s hit that horsie one more time: NVIDIA+VIA =Twu Wuv?

Could VIA's recently announced plan to sell some 300 million new shares be …

Well folks, he got here a little later this year—travelin' while dead is slow, hard, work—but the NVIDIA-VIA acquisition rumor horse is here once again to grace us with a visit. This time around, it was DigiTimes what kicked off the topic (citing "market sources"), and so here we are again.

What we know so far is that VIA intends to sell 300 million new shares of itself at approximately 27-35 US cents-per-share. A cash deal on the shares would drop some $93 million in VIA's pocket; the company has already announced plans to invest some $26.5 million USD into its VIA Optical Solution subsidiary.

NVIDIA, natch, has been fingered as a company that might buy up at least part of the shares, but the company refused to comment on the situation. VIA, for its part, says it will reveal potential candidates following its June 19 shareholder meeting. I'm not willing to take a stance on whether or not NVIDIA will buy a stake in VIA, but I will bet Jen-Hsun is considering the option more carefully than he's done in the past.

In the past, the idea of a VIA/NVIDIA alliance seemed off-base simply because VIA didn't appear to have anything NVIDIA would actually want. 2008, however, marked the rise of Atom, the netbook, and consumers' newfound interest in low-power/long-battery life systems. Relations between NVIDIA and Intel, meanwhile, have deteriorated. Santa Clara has made it clear that it doesn't want the Ion platform to succeed (even if said system is powered by an Atom), and the two companies are now embroiled in a legal slugfest over patents that could drag out for a decade.

Ultimately, VIA could be the choice of last resort. It's hard to buy into any sort of partnership with Intel when your so-called partner is literally pushing documents to its sales staff about how your product sucks. AMD is an option, but AMD owns ATI, and ATI just happens to be NVIDIA's direct competitor, so yeah. That's a bit complicated, too. VIA, on the other hand, has Nano. If it can actually get the next-generation of Nano ready and shipped, it might have half of what it needs to make Nano a contender. Then along comes NVIDIA, and slaps on the chipset.

None of these arguments are trail-blazing; many of them have been advanced before. What's changed, in this case, is the market's preferences for smaller, cheaper, netbooks as opposed to monsters with 17" screens and Blu-ray drives. If netbooks are the future of computing (or even a major force over the next 3-4 years) it changes the attractiveness of a VIA+NVIDIA partnership for both companies. On a purely practical note, it helps that VIA has demonstrated and shipped silicon capable of competing with Atom even if production was heavily delayed in 2008. If it does partner with the Taiwanese company, NVIDIA has some reassurance that the products it needs to drive its netbook chipsets will be built.

I'm gonna let the horse get along his way for now, but we'll see him in a year—or maybe not. Poor fella. Oughta get him one of those motorized scooters or sumthin.

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4 Reader Comments

  1. I think it all depends on what NVIDIA believes its chances are for getting a license for the i7/i5 chips. If they do buy into VIA, then Intel will probably be less likely to sell it to them.
    1927 posts | registered
  2. so when can i get a $99 network server with sata and a couple of gigabit ethernet ports that fits in a 3.5" slot together with a 2.5" drive and powered by a standard molex PSU socket?!

    That way I can switch off the main, power-hungry OS during off-hours and still run simple network services of the beefy PSU.

    Tower cases are the new rack mounts for small businesses!
    29 posts | registered
  3. Wouldn't the beefy PSU be running in a very inefficient range? Usually, below 20% load, efficiency tanks.
    1557 posts | registered
  4. I don't know much about PSU inefficiency apart from Anandtech reviews of PSUs, so pardon my hand waving:

    If the 20% you mention is somehow related to the PSU's optimal output, ie it's a fixed loss, then maybe
    If, on the other hand, the 20% is related to actual load, then I don't care:
    keeping a device that sips less than 10 watts attached to a 'beefy' PSU must be more efficient than keeping a 100watt system attached to the same PSU! Don't forget that most of the power hungry stuff would switch off with the main motherboard (CPU, PCI cards, hard-disks etc…) but I could still have a web & mail server running with the hardware separated into network zones. The biggest issue would be cabling inside the case, but a double-wide tower can solve this: I'm thinking of getting two identical cheap cases and bolting them together to get extra space. Heck, it could be modular and I could attach three cases! After all they're cheap!

    I can imagine a whole load of devices spawning out of this: a kvm that fits in a 3.5" slot, a small touch screen that can be flipped out of a 5.25" slot.
    29 posts | registered

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