ATi : "AMD64 chipset not coming in the next 6 months"

“We are committed to developing K8 core-logic, though it probably won’t be in the next six months. However, we will be working on both desktop and notebook chipsets,” Orton said in his interview to FiringSquad.

During the discussion of ATI’s fiscal Q4 2003 results earlier this year, the company said it pinned a lot of hopes on PCI Express and supporting core-logic products. As the PCI Express bus will start to emerge in Q2 or Q3 2004, we most probably should not expect any conventional chipsets for AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron microprocessors from ATI before that. Instead, the company is likely to offer an AMD64 core-logic based on PCI Express standard sometime later in the year, presumably in the second half.

NVIDIA – the main competitor of ATI Technologies in the market of graphics processors – has already indicated plans to launch a plethora of core-logic products for AMD’s 64-bit chips. The list of its nForce3-series devices includes chipsets for desktop, workstation, mobile and even server machines. It is very likely that when ATI finally comes to this market, it will be pretty hard for the company to expand its presence there, as the competition between NVIDIA and VIA – the number one supplier of AMD-supporting chipsets – promises to be extremely fierce next year. Nonetheless, ATI has an advantage over NVIDIA and VIA – it always offers chipsets with integrated graphics, while the mentioned pair of companies is concentrated on discrete solutions.