Last week, some people were excited to hear about Via making processors available for Intel socket 479 motherboards. The excitement came a little too soon, however, and a healthy dose of skepticism was in order. As it turns out, the CPUs that Via had demonstrated earlier are not being manufactured anymore, and are old stock. While Via does indeed have the chips, they will not be made more widely available to the public and instead Via will be concentrating on the Via V4 platform. It is independent of Intel's chipsets and will likely be their successor in their ultra-low power line of products. They also claim it is the last time they'll be producing socket-compatible chips:
On Thursday it was reported that Via's C7-M chips for Intel's socket 479m platform, which has been developed by Intel Corp., were showcased in a computer store in Tokyo, Japan. Usually, after such demonstrations products reach the retail market in the land of the rising sun. Even though the chips can reach the market this time too, the developer said that it would be the last product compatible with Intel's infrastructure.
It is always in Via's capacity to make chipsets for Intel, which would give them the technical ability to produce Intel-compatible CPUs, but years ago there was a lot of fallout surrounding Socket 370 that resulted in companies like IBM, AMD, Via and others halting production of Intel-compatible processors.