TAIPEI — Via Technologies is denying a local media report that said it is considering the sale of its CPU unit, which has been a source of losses since the company bought it four years ago.
The reported buyer is Transmeta Corp., also a maker of low-power CPUs and a competitor of Via in the embedded market.
Via insisted Thursday that it made little sense for the company to offload its CPU division at this time. "We think it should breakeven this year so it's still a sustainable business," said Richard Brown, Via's head of marketing. "It would be insane to get out now just when business is improving."
Brown said Via is starting to make inroads into the embedded market space and said the rumor of a sale was meant to scare off potential customers. He also noted that Via's motherboard division, which was created last year as a means to sell unlicensed Pentium 4 core logic, is now focusing all its attention on small form-factor embedded designs.
Via created the CPU division in 1999, merging two separate acquisitions of CPU design teams from National Semiconductor Corp. and Integrated Device Technology Inc. Originally, Via hoped to take on the likes of Intel Corp. in the mainstream PC business, but it backed away from that notion long ago, opting to focus on emerging markets interested in cheaper CPU technology that was "good enough."
More recently, the company has launched a platform approach for embedded systems, with the low-power Via C3 CPU and Via chipsets as the core of the system.
Via sells several million CPUs a year, using an advanced 0.13-micron manufacturing process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., but it still hasn't reached the economy of scale needed to make the business profitable.
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