20% of tablet PC are white-box, and most use VIA processors

A new story on Digitimes suggests just how successful the VIA Wondermedia chips are in the tablet PC space. Apparently 20% of global tablet PC shipments in Q1 this year were white-box models.
"Currently, most white-box tablet PCs are adopting 7-inch resistive touch screen panel with VIA Technologies' VIA8650 processor and the Android 2.2 operating system for a price as low as only NT$2,000 (US$69) ... "
Because they end up in tablets that don't carry a brand name and, let's face it, are sold as ultra-cheap tablets on eBay and Alibaba, VIA's success doesn't get a lot of headlines in the white-box tablet PC story.

VIA developing processors for servers

XBit Labs have published a very short little article that suggests that VIA are planning on developing a microprocessor just for the server market. The quote from VP Richard Brown that this seems to be based on is a little less certain however. He says "Our processors have been used quite extensively in low power blades for data center applications, and we are currently evaluating our future strategy and roadmap ..."
VIA Nano processors were featured in an innovative blade design by Dell a few years back but they never gained any real traction in the server market, which is dominated by the Wintel combo.

VIA agrees that BAPCo tests don't accurately reflect real world usage

AMD's PR agents would have lost some sleep last week over the media backlash that has accused them of being bad sports over how well Intel CPUs compare to AMD's in the most recent flavor of BAPCO SySMark benchmarks. AMD said they were pushed out of the BAPCO group and that the tests are not equal and not transparent.
Now VIA has come along and also decided to resign from the BAPCO group, with similar concerns. A VIA spokesperson said:
“We strongly believe that the benchmarking applications tests developed for SYSmark 2012 and EEcoMark 2.0 do not accurately reflect real world PC usage scenarios and workloads and therefore feel we can no longer remain as a member of the organization."
Oooh ... another disgruntled ex-member of the BAPCO group.

China needs 4G chips: VIA amongst crowd of companies wanting to supply them

China's mobile phone industry is just absolutely huge. The uptake of 3G in the country, however, has been surprisingly low. The biggest telecom operator in China, China Mobile, is moving ahead with 4G plans and along with Sequans Communications, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Innofidei, and Hisilicon Technologies, VIA is wanting to supply the hundreds of millions of chips required for the 4G handsets to be sold in China. More at Shanzai.com.