It looks like VIA has finally had enough of the schoolyard fights with Intel and tauntings with hair dyers, as it has just dropped word over the weekend that it's quitting the motherboard chipset business in order to focus on processors and chipsets for motherboards that use its own Nano CPU. According to Custom PC, this is actually a move that VIA had seen coming all along, with vice president of corporate marketing saying that, "one of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear." Of course, that also means that VIA is putting most of its "chips" in one basket (yes, we said it) and, as Slashdot points out, it leaves other third-party chip manufacturers like SiS with some tough questions to ask themselves.

[Via Slashdot]

Remember middle school? These guys do. NVIDIA, AMD, VIA and now SiS (only two capital letters? Not trying hard enough) have all teamed up in a fight against Intel of truly pubescent proportions. Intel has denied accusations of hiding the USB 3.0 spec, since it's not their spec to hide, and claims it has no obligation to disclose its actual host controller specification before it's ready. This apparently has the other chip makers scrambling to make their own host controller, so they aren't beholden to Intel's schedule. That could cause problems for the end product -- if they don't build theirs exactly like Intel's, and with Intel's already being on the market by the time they're done, they'll have to return to the drawing board and possibly delay their release by nine months. They claim this could give Intel two years of zero competition in the USB 3.0 space, but Intel figures since it plans to release the spec for free, is investing heavily in its development, and isn't done yet anyways, it doesn't owe those companies a thing. This just gets better and better.

As this year rolled in, AMD introduced a DTX open standard in hopes of boosting the allure of SFF adoption, and sure enough, Gigabyte took the bait. The firm's first mini DTX motherboard, dubbed Churchill, reportedly "serves as a base for AMD's Live! Home Media Server platform," and supports the Socket AM2 Athlon 64 and Sempron single- / dual-core processors. The mobo also features a SiS761GX north and SiS966 south bridge, an integrated Mirage 1 graphics core, a single PCIe slot, one vanilla PCI slot, six SATA ports, a total of eight USB 2.0 connectors scattered about, an built-in audio to boot. No word on pricing just yet, but the wee board should slip in under your nose sometime in July.

Clevo, original source for many hundreds of OEM laptops, has just announced a model that's sure to be a hit among the rebadging crowd, as it offers a pretty compelling feature set in a sub-four-pound package. Besides being the first notebook to sport SiS' new SiSM671 "high performance" Northbridge chipset, the 12.1-inch M721S/M720S also offers a choice of Core 2 Duo processors, up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, and sweetest of all, a built in 3G modem for UMTS / HSDPA action. Price and release remain a mystery (still no mention of this one on the Clevo site), but even if you miss it the first time around, you can rest assured that it will show up in countless other branded iterations.

[Via Laptop Logic]