Long-standing partnership between VIA and AMD achieves historic milestone, looks to the next 100 million with the advancement of technologies on the AMD64 platform and beyond

Taipei, Taiwan, 23 February 2005 - VIA Technologies, Inc, the leading supplier of core-logic chipsets for AMD (NYSE: AMD) processor platforms, today announced the unique achievement of 100 million core-logic chipsets for AMD Athlon™ processors. The 100 millionth chipset, a VIA K8T890, will be presented to AMD by VIA President and CEO Wenchi Chen at a ceremony to be held in San Francisco on Thursday 24th February.

The VIA K8T890 is an advanced PCI Express™ chipset for the very latest AMD64 processors with support for a 1GHz/16-bit HyperTransport™ technology bus and a multi-peripheral PCI Express implementation, representing the foundation stone for the next hundred million chipset milestone. Offering a comprehensive range of chipsets covering all market segments, including desktop, mobile, workstation and server, VIA is well positioned to continue to drive the advancement of the AMD platform market.

“VIA’s support has been vital in the evolution and growth of AMD, from the introduction of early AMD processors all the way through to today’s powerful AMD64 processors,” said Dirk Meyer, executive vice president, Computation Products Group, AMD. “AMD’s close partnering with industry leaders such as VIA has set the standard of offering the best solutions to meet customer’s individual needs. This incredible milestone is a testament to that strategy, and we look forward to seeing the next 100 million VIA chipsets power future generations of AMD processors.”

“We are proud to have played such a prominent role in the amazing journey of the AMD platform. Systems featuring the powerful combination of a VIA chipset and AMD processor have met the needs of countless professionals, enthusiasts and everyday computer users all over the world,” commented Wenchi Chen, President and CEO, VIA Technologies, Inc. “VIA will continue to work closely with AMD to offer innovative, high performance products, ensuring many more significant milestones in the years to come.”

VIA first joined forces with AMD in 1994 with chipset support for the Am486DX2 running at 40MHz. This successful partnership resulted in leading chipset support for the AMD Athlon™ processor family and, as AMD processors continued to gain momentum in consumer and enterprise markets, the AMD64 platform, which was launched in 2003 for 32- and 64-bit computing. With successive generations of chipsets, VIA has delivered innovative features and rock-solid stability to enable the AMD platform to maintain its performance crown.

Throughout this time span, from the introduction of the acclaimed VIA KX133 chipset in 1999, to the recently announced VIA K8T890 PCI Express chipset, VIA chipsets have consistently introduced numerous advanced technologies to the AMD platform. While other vendors were promoting the benefits of alternative RAMBUS RDRAM memory, VIA pioneered the introduction of PC133 SDRAM memory, then DDR SDRAM memory for the AMD processor platform, realizing these standards had the performance levels and cost benefits to effectively meet the needs of the market. More recently, VIA chipsets have continued this trend with introduction of new technologies such as PCI Express, Serial ATA and integrated V-RAID storage.

The core-logic chipset can be described as the central nervous system of a computer, typically handling communications between the system’s processor, memory, graphics ports, storage devices and other I/O connections. Being responsible for all communication between the system’s key components, the quality of the chipset design is a major factor in determining system performance and reliability.