ATI Technologies Inc, the Canadian graphics chip maker, has made the rare move from PCs to workstations by announcing an OEM deal with Sun Microsystems Inc for its Rage Pro Turbo graphics chips. The chips will be used by Sun for its Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 low-end workstations, providing 2D and 3D graphics to software development, CAD/CAM,CAE, financial, content creation and animation customers. Sun had been using ATI’s previous generation of Rage chips in the workstations since June of this year. The deal marks Sun’s new willingness to move away from proprietary graphics chips towards commodity parts. ATI has until now sold its chips to high-end PCs from the likes of Dell Computer Corp and Gateway Inc. ATI, which completed its acquisition of media-chip maker Chromatic Research Inc on Monday, also announced an OEM deal with Fujitsu Ltd yesterday, for use in FMV corporate and DeskPower consumer PCs to be sold into the Japanese market. ATI began trading on the Nasdaq stock market yesterday.
