ATI Gives Chipsets a Try - Introducing the Radeon IGP

Final Words

While clearly not as hard hitting and impressive as NVIDIA's initial nForce launch at Computex, we do believe that ATI is on the right track with their Radeon IGP line of chipsets. From a high level overview such as what we have given you today it's clear to see that ATI is taking a very conventional approach to their entry into the chipset business. This makes a lot of sense since it's this very same approach that Intel and VIA have used for years and it seems to be working just fine.

But there's much more to be done than put together a set of solid looking specifications as NVIDIA has definitely learned from the nForce. There is much more validation that must go into a chipset platform than a graphics card and support from motherboard manufacturers is definitely key. As it stands the only notebook partners publicly announcing support for the Radeon IGP are Arima, Compal and Quanta. On the desktop side, ATI is announcing with familiar faces like FIC and Gigabyte.

While the potential of having another solid chipset competitor in the desktop market is definitely a good thing, we're actually much more interested in seeing the Radeon IGP used in notebooks - preferably this year on when Radeon 8500 based graphics core moves into the chipset. ATI's great relationships with the major OEMs should help out tremendously in achieving that but as we know all too well, things move much slower in the notebook market than we're used to so it may take a while.

ATI will have a long road ahead if they want to take a bigger chunk out of the market than NVIDIA did. What you should remember however is that ATI's direct competition in the chipset market isn't NVIDIA, it's VIA. It will be interesting to see not only how ATI fares in competition with the Taiwanese giant but also if it drives VIA to do anything special with their current line of integrated chipsets.

This marks the second major initiative by a graphics manufacturer to enter the PC chipset business, we can only hope that it'll be more successful than the first - good luck.