For many years the Taiwanese chipset makers weren't able to compete with Intel's chipset products in terms of performance as well as success, but lately times have changed. VIA's tremendous success in 2000 gave ALi and SiS enough hope to come back out of the dark now too. It is not surprising that Intel is not going to threaten its CPU business by providing chipsets for the competiting Duron and Athlon processors. AMD continues to point out that it does not want to become a chipset maker, but merely some kind of technology pointer. Instead, AMD primarily wants to show the chipset makers what an Athlon chipset should look like.

VIA was the first company to proactively supply chipsets for AMD processors, thus being one of the driving forces to establish both AMD processors in the market and themselves as one of the top chipset providers today. Now, more than one year after the time when Athlon's success was still questionable, ALi and SiS are finally entering the AMD-platform market too. Acer Laboratories has skipped the first two Athlon generations and provides its MaGiK1 chipset with support for DDR SDRAM and the recently announced Athlon processors at 133 MHz FSB. VIA is also working on its DDR chipsets for Athlon (Apollo KT266). The first chipset from Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) is named 730s and can be called a masterpiece of integration. One single BGA chip (672 balls) hosts all functions for which the other companies need at least two chips. This interesting product is most certainly worth a look.