ATI readies June mobo jamboree

SOURCES CLOSE to ATI's plans tell the INQUIRER that its Athlon and Pentium 4 motherboards are likely to arrive far earlier than anyone imagined.
According to the normally reliable source, although speculation is that the boards based on the chipsets are due in September, we will see products using them as early as June.

The firm is ramping up its battle against other players in the market including Nvidia, SIS, Via and ALI.

The last player seems to be left a little behind in the race, but of course the biggest competitor of all is Intel, which manages to have its cake and eat it by both licensing the Pentium 4 design and selling its own chipset products against its customers' versions.

In other news, the same source said that despite speculation by the press – and we've done our share of that too – the R300 graphics processor unit (GPU) has taped out, and engineers in locations on both the West Coast and East Coast of the US are already working on future revs – the R400 and the R450.

The source suggested that we'd be likely to see products based on the R300 far earlier than anyone expected. µ