Interview With Mr Rene Froeleke of ATI
2. Page 2
What is the market share for ATI? In which way do you believe that upcoming products (CrossFire, etc) will affect your OEM and retail sales?
The market share numbers vary by product segment. For the PC Desktop space, we are currently leading the segment of discrete graphics (i.e. without chipset integrated graphics) with a share of 56% according to the Q2/05 numbers from Mercury Research. And of course, we try to freshen up the market with every new product or technology, be it CrossFire or our upcoming graphics chips which will be launched very soon.
The release of CrossFire had been scheduled for August. What were the reasons for its delay?
We came across some issues during our QA testing, and as we wanted to supply the most complete dual-GPU solution, we wanted to make sure that we understand the root cause of these problems. Once identified, we had to test it against all possible combinations of graphic adapters.
Could you provide us with an update of the release dates for all three 90nm R500 desktop chips (R520, RV530, and RV515)?
Sorry, I can’t give you the exact release date, but it will be very soon…
What are the main reasons that prompted ATI to move to the 90nm production technology? Have you come up with any problems with the silicon fabrication at 90nm?
The main reasons when moving from one manufacturing process to the next are essentially always the same, you can get more transistors onto the same space and run the chip at higher clock speeds. We had some problems with 2 out of 4 chips manufactured using 90 nanometer, but these were not related to the process technology or our manufacturing partner.