Today, ATI annouced its first ever motherboard chipset in Cebit at Hannover, Germany. With great public and media interest they have launched seven different products encompassing four northbridges and two southbridges. ATI's intention is to grab more market share of the rapidly growing integrated chipset market that is estimated to power half the PCs on the market. They plan on doing this by providing reliability, quality and performance that is expected by a product with this brand name. All at a cost-effective pricepoint that will be attractive in all key market areas.

Why the jump to the chipset market? The question should actually be asked why not? The chipset market especially the integrated chipset market has a substantial amount of growth predicted that everyone wants to cash in on. Nvidia went into it with a "high performance" integrated chipset that targetted the high end of the market. I thought it was a great product but it has not as yet made a big impact in the market. ATI already has all the video products it can put into the chipset but no chipset and thats what a team in Santa Clara has been doing for the past eighteen months with the additional bonus that they probably already have engineers from the ArtX division who designed the S1-370 TL. I don't believe that product ever came out when ATI acquired it.

I was fortunate enough to be briefed on ATI's new products a week ago and briefly saw a few of them in action during my lunch break and unfortunately I have very little to say about the performance related issues because I had to quickly go back to work!