Yeah, VIA is mainly known from their chipsets. They're pretty good chipsets too. My motherboard uses the VIA K8T800 Northbridge and the VIA VT8237 Southbridge. Pretty good stuff.
Texas Instruments makes some damn good calculators. The TI-89 Titanium is pretty nice and is a common sight at my school. Oh, don't forget DLP (Digital Light Processing). Pure awesomeness...
Yes. IBM makes PowerPC cores. They used to make the PowerPC processors for Apple computers, but now Apple decided to switch to Intel.
The Xbox 360 has a custom tri-core processor consisting of three PowerPC processing cores with two threads per core (something similar to Intel's HyperThreading). The PlayStation 3 has the Cell processor, co-developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony. It has a single PowerPC core with eight SPE cores with very high floating-point capabilites and one reserve SPE core for redundancy. The Revolution has also has a IBM processor, but virtually no specifications has been released for it, although judging by Nintendo's way of doing things, it'll probably be single core and faster than the GameCube's "Gekko" core (also developed and manufactured by IBM).
The Xbox and PlayStation 2 are the only current-generation consoles without IBM processors. The PlayStation 2's Emotion Engine processor was co-developed by Toshiba and Sony. The Xbox's Intel Pentium III/Celeron processor was developed by...well, Intel. It's very much like a low voltage Mobile processor, because it uses the PGA (Pin Grid Array), which is "soldered" to the motherboard itself.
im almost 100% sure IBM had a line of cpu's that were their own at one point but then just stopped and now work with companies to make cpu's... and yes ask alvino anything about a console and he can usually tell you, with a little xbox biased of course
IBM only makes processors through contracts. They don't sell retail because there are really no motherboards suitable for the PowerPC processors they make. Yes, IBM could certainly give AMD and Intel a run for their money...very much.
im almost 100% sure IBM had a line of cpu's that were their own at one point but then just stopped and now work with companies to make cpu's... and yes ask alvino anything about a console and he can usually tell you, with a little xbox biased of course