Friday, December 22nd 2006
ATI letting partners design their own cards
ATI, the graphics manufacturing division of AMD, has announced that it plans to allow third party manufacturers to design and produce their own graphics card boards to their own capacities for certain chips. Until now, ATI and NVIDIA have not sold their high-end chips directly to other manufacturers, instead choosing to make the cards under their own supervision using a contract manufacturer first. This, in theory, ensures that the quality of all their graphics cards is high for end consumers. Graphics board manufacturers should now have more freedom in how they build the cards, with the X1950XT being one of the GPUs they will be allowed to do this with. Although ATI will still supervise the board manufacturing process, their partners should have more breathing space to customise the cards.
Hopefully this move will see more choice for the end consumers because the boards will not be built to such a strict specification, although it could be at the cost of performance if some companies chose a low price over high quality. With any luck, ATI will still ensure that all the cards meet a high standard so consumers don't get cheated out of their money with sub-par products.
Source:
X-bit labs
Hopefully this move will see more choice for the end consumers because the boards will not be built to such a strict specification, although it could be at the cost of performance if some companies chose a low price over high quality. With any luck, ATI will still ensure that all the cards meet a high standard so consumers don't get cheated out of their money with sub-par products.
14 Comments on ATI letting partners design their own cards
Now to have some manufacturer make a shorter card, with zalman cooling and better capasitors, now we are talking. At least you know you pay for something usefull. Sure there will be those cheapo cards that cost a panny to manufactire and sold for a dime "get you new GerForza8800GTZ (not a typo) for just 100$!" But theyäll propably last a year too and then it's time to upgrade anyways :P
-driver problems
-quality control issues (remember those manufactures who will sell it have to pay to have them produced, there is no partnership with ATI)
-anti completive nature (why would they compete against one another if they are selling the exact same product)
-OC'ing nightmares (can you say 7900 series LOL). Just because a video card comes over clock doesn't mean it's fully functional.
-Introducing manufactures to this market. I am talking blatant obvious manufactures that have nothing to do with video cards. For example, HD manufactures, MB manufactures, even sound card manufacturers, etc you get the idea. What will be their motivate to produce video cards and why are they in this market? Will they be here for the short/long term?
-etc
Still news does say it's only for few cards and it doesn't say they'll stop manufacturing those same cards or the rest.
all that partners can do now is build their own x1950 pcb designs, just like they can for all the other lower end cards. the driver will still be universal = catalyst. so what you will probably see now is an x1950 xtx with simpler voltage regulation and gddr3 = cheaper
thanks for clearing that up...
-The Eagle
It looks like AMD is following up on their CEO's statement to integrate AMD's cpu with an ATI graphics card and is getting out of the plug in video card business by franchising out the design work on plug in cards to others. It smells like AMD has conceded this field to Nividia!