ATI faces stiff competition in the AMD market from VIA and Nvidia who have established products in the market. The low-end is filled up by VIA and the high-end with strong products by their eternal rival Nvidia. Therefore ATI has to come out strong and deliver a product that will appeal both to the OEMs and consumers.

ATI has broken down the overall market into two segments, Consumer and Commercial.

Consumer Market Split-up

Commercial Market Split-up

ATI’s two new northbridge chipsets, are differentiated by the inclusion of an integrated graphics core in the Xpress 200. Both chips are pin-compatible with one another allowing a manufacturer to choose either chip for the same PCB design. The Radeon Xpress 200 northbridge has standard features that are fairly similar to their competitors. With the memory controllers onboard the processor there is not much to differentiate northbridge chipsets these days. Communications to CPU is done through a 16-bit 800MHz/1GHz HyperTransport link.

ATI wanted to meet three goals when designing their new AMD chipset to appeal to this broad range:

1. Performance – provide industry leading 3D graphics and platform performance
2. Connectivity – Universal connectivity for multimedia and peripherals
3. Reliability - delivers rock-solid hardware and software platform

Let’s find out how the Radeon Xpress 200 line meets these goals.