VIA

Not to be overshadowed by NVIDIA's entry as a competitor, VIA, against the wishes of Intel, covertly showcased their P4X266 Pentium 4 chipset. The story behind the chipset is interesting, as VIA has yet to obtain a license for the AGTL+ Pentium 4 bus, yet is still confident that they will not run into legal problems with Intel. According to VIA, their rights to S3 include a cross-licensing agreement with Intel that should keep the chipset maker out of legal trouble. Thickening the plot was the fact that the P4X266 outperformed Intel's i850 chipset in a high-resolution run of 3Dmark 2001.

However, VIA's primary purpose at Computex 2001 was to introduce the latest revision to their C3 processor, code-named Ezra. Because the processor is not intended to compete against Intel or AMD's high-end, VIA is abiding by the mantra "Cooler Computing" to ensure expectations of the chip are directed towards the mobile and low-cost system market. Etched on a 130-nanometer manufacturing process, the C3 should be an ideal candidate for mobile machines as the smaller die promotes longer battery life and less overall heat output. The initial launch of Ezra is at 800MHz, scaling to 1GHz before the next product revision.