I dont This is A HUGE start for ATi in the Chipset business. Nvidia will not get a fair start with chipsets w/ Mircosoft. ATintel vs. NVindows. Good news ANTI-RAMBUS fans.
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Intel Corp. officials confirmed that they have granted ATI Technologies Inc. a license to manufacture Pentium 4-compliant chipsets, sounding the starting gun for other manufacturers.

For now, ATI (stock: ATYT) has a nominal advantage over leading chipset makers Via Technologies Inc. and Acer Laboratories Inc., which lack their own licenses.

But that fact has not stopped Via in the past, which has used the terms of current licensing agreements to its own advantage.

A week ago, Intel (stock: INTC) and ATI signed a cross-licensing agreement settling outstanding litigation between the two companies, as well as granting the right for ATI to manufacture core logic chipsets.

Intel officials confirmed Friday the agreement included a Pentium 4 bus license, and that it was the first it had granted in the PC space.

Officials at ATI, Thornhill, Ontario, were unavailable for further comment.

Allowing third-party manufacturers to produce chipsets has always been somewhat of a dicey proposition at Intel, Santa Clara, Calif.

Historically, analysts say Intel entered the chipset market because vendors weren't developing their own products fast enough to keep up with Intel's microprocessor development.

That has roiled Taiwan's chipset vendors, who have courted the favor of Intel's microprocessor team but have competed furiously against Intel's chipset business.

Market issues have also played a part.

While Intel has introduced a 1.3-GHz Pentium 4 to push the new chip into lower-cost segments, market watchers perceive the price of the associated Direct RDRAM still to be too high.

Intel's Pentium 4 chipset designed for cheaper SDRAM, dubbed "Brookdale," isn't due out until at least the third quarter.

So if third-party chipset vendors can obtain a license, they can also help to make the Pentium 4 more successful, analysts reasoned.

"Our theory is that it's in Intel's best interests to start licensing the P4 bus," said Dean McCarron, analyst with Mercury Research Inc., Scottsdale, Ariz. "It may be negative for Intel's core logic business, but if [Intel] remains too closed, the low cost integrated chipset vendors will support AMD."

Still, that ATI would receive such a license first is somewhat surprising.

Traditionally, Taiwan's Via and Acer Labs have been first to market with the latest chipsets, with Silicon Integrated Systems Inc. close behind.

ATI is officially the first with such a license, analysts said, although Intel's server partner, ServerWorks Corp., officially owns a license to use Intel's Pentium III bus as well as a "next-generation processor bus," according to Tammy Lee, a company spokeswoman.

Although many believe ServerWorks has been granted a license to design Pentium 4-compliant chipsets, analysts aren't sure whether ServerWorks will design a chipset for a desktop PC, especially after its pending acquisition by Broadcom Corp. (stock: BRCM) closes.

Officials at Via and Acer have claimed that they have been "in discussions" with Intel over licensing the Pentium 4 bus for about a year, and on Friday executives at both companies hadn't changed their stance.

Tim Chen, a spokesman for Via's U.S. headquarters in Fremont, Calif., said Via was in discussions with Intel.

"But I'm afraid I can't reveal the details right now," he said.

But, he said, the agreement to obtain a Pentium III bus license took well over a year, with meetings occurring roughly every week.

Fred Leung, an associate vice-president of marketing and sales at Acer Labs in San Jose, Calif., also said both Intel and Acer were in talks, but could not offer a time frame on their successful completion.

"Let me put it this way," he said. "Acer Laboratories will support all viable CPU vendors, and we'll definitely do [one for] Intel. Intel is one of the key ones."

A traditional loophole has been to manufacture finished chipsets at so-called "protected" foundries, which already own a broad cross-license to Intel's patents.

In 1999, Via had manufactured its Apollo Pro chipsets at National Semiconductor Corp. (stock: NSM) in defiance of Intel and its subsequent lawsuits.

Via and Intel settled all of their chipset litigation in the middle of 2000.

Last year, Via showed a roadmap to an "Apollo Pro 2001" chipset, designed for the Pentium 4.

Although ATI's license seemingly gives the company an advantage in product development, Acer's Leung disagreed.

"As long as you buy a P4 system and reverse-engineer it, there's no problem," he said. "If you sell it, it's a different story."


Cel 533 - 256mb sdram
15gb HD - ati radeon 32mb ddr (200/200)
SB live! mp3+ - win98 Beos

I would certainly hope they work with ATI cards! Unfortunately, ATI has a bad reputation for selling products that turn out to be somewhat less than expected.

Suicide is painless...........

HEHE, intel is only working ATi for P4 Sdram support. Intel most likely gave ATi detailed P4 design Info. Most likely more detailed info they would give VIA, SIS, MICRON, and ALi. I would say Intel proformace. If you want to call it, most likely ATi i855

Cel 533 - 256mb sdram
15gb HD - ati radeon 32mb ddr (200/200)
SB live! mp3+ - win98 Beos

I just found out ATI already makes a northbridge for PIIIs: the S1-370 TL. It looks like it has a Radeon type engine in it but I'm not sure... Anyone have a board using this chip?

Hardware-accelerated geometry transformation & lighting (T&L)
12.5 million polygons/second set-up rate
4 pixels/clock pixel rate
330 million pixels/second fill rate
8x Virtual AGP
Accelerated floating point geometry and texture coordinate transformation, clipping, perspective projection
Accelerated specular, diffuse, and ambient lighting
3D points, lines, triangles, polygons
Perspective-correct trilinear-filtered MIP-mapped texture mapping
Alpha blending
Exponential pixel fog
Z and stencil buffering
Anti-aliasing
Framebuffer clear and copy
30fps DVD playback with hardware motion compensation
128-bit BitBLT engine, 256 raster operations
Full color RGBA, color expansion, color keying
YUV planar 4:2:0, 4:2:2 video overlay, video scaling and filtering

Crashman: ATI hardware has always worked for me (I started using ATI with a 64k EGA Wonder in my XT), 'tho I must admit sometimes you have to wait a while for the drivers.

- JW

hmmm, I must've missed this little news item somehow, I usually come to thg to see whats happening.

I guess I'll go straight to the register for my news now, oh, looky here some more news about intel(Intel Samples Brookdale) thats not on thg, hmmm.

I know I'm not THAT biased!

- Amd Helpdesk -