This is the third article in our series of interviews with industry company executives, PR persons and general know-it-alls that answers those questions burning in your minds about the industry and/or the company in focus. The unique feature of this series is that you, our readers, are the ones asking the questions.

Today's round of questions/answers is with VIA Technologies, Inc.. Our thanks to VIA's PR and Marketing department for their responses.

Chas asks:

1. Are you actively developing for P4 or holding off till the next chip+chipset revision?

VIA: We are considering developing discrete as well as SMA (integrated) chipsets for the P4 processor supporting DDR memory.

2. Will we see a DDR platform for P3 (single chip and SMP) processors?

VIA: We have already launched our VIA Apollo Pro266 DDR chipset, which supports both single and dual Pentium III processors. There are already a lot of motherboards featuring this chipset available from all the leading mainboard vendors. Please check out the DDR Zone on our website for further information.

3. Will you be taking advantage of other technology advances (like chipsets with on-die RAM)? Any stance on QBR/QDR (Quad Bit/Data Rate) RAM yet?

VIA: We are always looking at new technologies that could potentially improve the functionality and performance of a PC System. Up to now, though, we haven't yet made any firm decisions on whether to implement on-die DRAM or QBR/QDR DRAM.

Swing asks: Will VIA introduce a PIII chipset that provides the same functions as the i815 [and i815e]?

VIA: We were the first company to introduce both discrete and integrated chipsets supporting PC133 memory with the VIA Apollo Pro133A and VIA Apollo PM133, so Intel has been playing catch-up with i815. Now our major priority is the rapid roll out of our next generation DDR chipsets; the VIA Apollo Pro266 for the Intel Pentium III processor is already widely available.