Canadian graphics chip maker ATI Technologies Inc is the latest company to unveil its plans for integrating graphics chipsets into the PC architecture, in a bid for the high volume low-end PC and consumer appliance businesses. The Toronto-based company announced an integrated graphics and core logic product program earlier this week with its Shared Memory Architecture product line. It already has low-cost graphics accelerator chips for PC makers, and has also announced plans for new high-end system-on-a-chip products based around its acquisition late last year of Chromatic Research Inc (CI No 3,522).
The SMA products integrate North Bridge and graphics acceleration components to provide single chip, shared memory offering that previously required two discrete chips. The parts will interface with Pentium II and Pentium III microprocessors as well as other processors. ATI says it won’t compromise features or performance as a result of the integration, one of the reasons why current integrated products haven’t been widely accepted in the market. SMA products will be found in sub $500 and sub $800 systems, around 9% of the overall market for graphics chips, according to International Data Corp figures.
ATI plans to offer a family of SMA products with different features and levels of performance. Sampling will begin the second half of 1999. Earlier this month, S3 Inc partnered with VIA Technologies Inc to combine S3’s Savage4 graphics engine with VIA’s Apollo Pro core logic design. And this week, Intel Corp announced its 810 graphics chipset. Meanwhile Taiwan’s Silicon Integrated Systems Corp announced its SiS530 and SiS620 North Bridge chips with integrated 2D/3D graphics last July, and introduced a companion South Bridge XSiS960 chip for multimedia and communications three months ago. SiS signed a patent cross-licensing agreement with Intel at the start of this year.
