what is happening to the world ??
from totally unreliable sources:=
"...........MAKE OF THIS AS YOU WILL, but we heard from
normally highly reliable sources at Computex last week
that as recently as this time last year Via was
seriously considering buying AMD.
That would have been a masterstroke for Via CEO Wen Chi
Chen if he could have pulled off the plan.
Formidable obstacles -- no doubt in the shape of Jerry
Sanders III as well as the sums of money that would
probably have been involved -- might well have
convinced Via that the time for such an acquisition was
not ripe.
And it would also have pitched Via firmly against
Intel, and catapulted it firmly into the worldwide CPU
market.
Although Via is a force to be reckoned with in the
industry, the US seems to have something of a blind
spot about the company, which is owned by mega
Taiwanese corporation Formosa Plastics.
Via has already used the acquisition vehicle to
increase its presence in the marketplace, with
multi-million dollar deals giving it a number of US
firms and divisions including Centaur, Cyrix, a chunk
of S3, a bit of LSI Logic and goodness knows what else.
Such a bold stroke would have galvanised the industry.
Three years ago, at an Intel Developer Forum, chief
technology officer Pat Gelsinger told us that it was
rightly paranoid about Via - more paranoid in fact than
it was about AMD, widely perceived as its main
competition.
At the INQUIRER, we also know that Via was seriously
interested in acquiring Transmeta - so much so, in
fact - that the latter company protected itself with a
so-called "poison pill" piece of US regulatory paper.
Other firms that we know have also been interested in
Transmeta include its friend Nvidia, which wants to
give itself leverage against future Microsoft
negotiations.