A 20 per cent increase in desktop processor shipments during its third fiscal quarter helped VIA narrow its loss to TWD50m ($1.5m), the chip maker said today.

That's less than a third of the TWD1.68bn ($50m) loss the company posted at the end of its second quarter. VIA's sales were up almost 25 per cent sequentially, from Q2's TWD4.49bn ($134m) to Q3's TWD5.59bn ($167m).

According to a Merrill Lynch report cited by DigiTimes, that revenue jump and the shipments behind it took VIA's share of the x86 desktop CPU market to 2.5 per cent during Q3 - small, perhaps, but nonetheless an improvement on its share in Q2. Then, according to Mercury Research figures (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/11/intel_amd_x86_share/), it shared 1.8 per cent of the x86 market with Transmeta and other x86 CPU makers. ®

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