ViaHardware has posted an article on How VIA Got On Top - The story of how VIA gained control of the chipset market. The article describes VIA´s chipset history and how VIA´s timings, AMD´s good fortune, and Intel´s mishaps, have put VIA on top of the chipset market.

It was not that long ago, when all of us were living in an Intel dominated world, in both chipsets and processors. There were of course the alternative chipsets and processors such as the AMD K6, but they were seen just as alternatives to an Intel product, and not competition. As Intel grew away from the Socket 7 architecture and into Slot 1 form, this left the AMD processors without a platform to run on. Up to this point, Intel had for the most part made all of the motherboards that the Intel Pentium and AMD K6 ran on. When Intel moved to the Slot 1 architecture, they naturally stopped producing Socket 7 chipsets. Some analysts fault AMD for never really concentrating on a chipset of their own. They of course now have the AMD 750 chipset for the AMD Athlon, but even AMD had hoped they would not have to rely on their own chipsets for the Athlon, more on that later.

Read more