The incestuous nature of IWill and Arima

A COUPLE OF YEARS or so ago, the mainboard manufacturer IWill seemed in pretty bad shape, and against the background of what was gossiped in Taipei as a mass walkout by many of its key personnel in, it was said, management, strategic and engineering roles, we wondered whether it would survive in an increasingly competitive market.

However, this once highly innovative and quality focussed mainboard manufacturer - famed also for their add-in and integrated SCSI controllers - seems to have managed to stay the course, and last year it introduced a dual-processor mainboard for the, then newly announced, AMD Opteron.

To us this looked remarkably similar to a board we knew had been designed and manufactured by OEM and server mainboard manufacturer Arima.

Subsequently, we were told by Arima that this was in fact the very same mainboard, and had been manufactured by Arima for IWill and, it said, that Arima produced many other mainboards for IWill.

Around this time a high-end systems integrator friend of ours dallied with Arima branded mainboards but ended up experiencing significant technical problems that culminated in a return of the products to Arima and a switch to Tyan mainboards.

The news today though is that we've been told by a very well placed source, that a number of Arima design engineers may have been poached by IWill and that this is likely to be the basis for a resurgence of IWill.

With more and more interest in dual-processor systems by PC enthusiasts and the availability of more consumer focussed multi-threaded applications that can exploit this power under Windows XP Professional, IWill - with its new ex-Arima engineers - may be able to carve out a niche for themselves.

Though whether Arima's production lines will now continue to manufacture for IWill is unclear, but we suspect not…

My news stories at CeBIT this year are brought about by an AMD Athlon 64 powered notebook by manufactured by Arima, but branded by Medion.

It hasn't missed a beat and with its ATi Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics, is highly recommended as a reliable and portable powerhouse of a desktop replacement.

It's also great for the rapid development of muscle tissue, as it's almost as heavy as it is powerful, and traversing the halles of the CeBIT Messe with it, has been rather a challenge.

As I asked AMD for the loan of a "thin and light", this was a blatant stitch-up by Rabah Ichadadene of AMD for my outing him as a Geek in last year's INQ Awards. Many people are looking forward to see what the forthcoming INQ Party Awards will bring.

Anyway, perhaps the loss of mainboard engineers won't hurt Arima too much as they seem to be carving up some good business in the rather more lucrative notebook field, as we have seen several large OEMs taking on Arima notebooks such as this one.