Although ATI Technologies has not yet announced its PCIe desktop chipsets, the company has already begun shipping the products.

ATI has not announced the product yet since the company wants to “show it in the results,” Orton explained. ATI is happy with the initial customer reception on both the AMD and Intel platform, he added.

The company is expected to make the formal announcement that it is shipping PCIe chipsets in volume later this month.

ATI is the first company to ship PCIe-enabled core-logic chipsets for the AMD K8 platform, and this will be its first chipset offering for an AMD processor platform. The company is offering two K8 chipsets, the RX480 discrete chipset, and the RX480 integrated part. ATI will also launch the RS400 integrated chipset for Intel's Pentium 4 platform.

The integrated graphics will support DirectX 9.0.

The chips will be manufactured using a 0.13-micron process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), according to Reuven Soraya, director of platform product marketing at ATI. The company will use 0.11-micron processes by the end of the year, stated Orton.

According to sources at Taiwan PC makers, the ATI north bridge chips will be supported by ALi's PCIe-enabled M1573 south bridge. ALi completed the design-in process for the M1573 chip two months ago, according to the sources.

ATI's PCIe south bridge solution will support high-definition audio, PCIe x1 lanes and integrated RAID. Integrated Gigabit Ethernet will not be offered at first.

In related news, ATI announced its second consecutive quarter of record revenues for its fiscal-2004 fourth quarter. The company announced revenues of $572.2 million for the quarter ending August 31, a 50.3% increase on-year. Revenues for the full 2004 fiscal year grew 44.1%, sequentially, to $2.0 billion. Net income for the year increased nearly six-fold to $0.80 per share from $0.14 per share in fiscal 2003.

From DigiTimes