ATI to make motherboard move
nFORCE gets its first high level competitor
Although NVIDIA's nFORCE motherboard chipset will launch in Q4 with quite a backing, rival video card manufacturer ATI have their own plans in that area. A3, the codename for their competing project, is coming along nicely, with rumour-mongerers Xbit Labs claiming that the motherboards at the end of the line will probably be Pentium 4 compliant, even though ATI itself is talking about Pentium III and Athlon. ATI holds a license to produce Pentium 4 motherboards, secured earlier this year, but this isn't necessarily binding for them. On the other hand, this may be an opportunity for ATI, since NVIDIA currently does not own a P4 license, and would have difficulty producing motherboards for the new Intel CPUs before mid-2002. Either way, the ATI A3 motherboards will feature an ATI-made Northbridge with a Southbridge part being recommended from Acer Labs to manufacturers. A3 will support PC1600 and 2100 DDR memory, with an integrated clock. A3 sports an external AGP slot, but in its default configuration utilizes an onboard RV200 chip derivative. RV200 is the cutdown (two pipeline) version of the forthcoming Radeon 2 VE card for business/budget consumers. Radeon 2 will hit store shelves in September for desktop machines, and RV200 before Christmas. We reckon A3 will pop up just in time to compete with nFORCE, of which we'll learn more at ECTS in September. Related Feature - NVIDIA Crush on AMD