ATI has to come back in mainstream and notebook segments

SO R600 is in a bit of a mess. The delay mean that ATI fanbois who wanted to get this card will just give up and buy a Geforce 8800 GTX instead. We've had a verutable deluge of emails confirming this scenario. ATI delayed until Q2 and that's just too long.

There are only a few hard core fans that are ready to wait that long. G80 is simply a great chip and thsoe ATI boys have to face it. It is been selling for almost six months now and it finally got its DirectX 10 WHQL drivers. There is simply nothing more to object to about the chip.

It is very obvious that DAAMIT lost this round. Even if R600 is significantly faster than G80, which we seriously doubt, Nvidia can probably respin its G80 at faster speed to beat DAAMIT's new chip. Being more than six months later than the competition doesn't help you at all.

Still, there are at least two hopes for DAAMIT this year. Both are 65 nanometre and they are supposed to cover the mainstream and entry-level market. These chips have a few advantages over Nvidia's. OF course, we are talking about RV630 and RV610.

We will concentrate to the most obvious advantages. Both chips will be smaller and will dissipate less heat than Nvidia's G84 and G84. ATI could have a big chance in the notebook market. It can and should regain teh lead in this market segment.

It is still unclear how ATI contrived to lose so much notebook market to Nvidia in the first place. All DAAMIT needs now is the right clock at the right yields to beat Nvidia. Let's hope for DAAMIT's sake that it won't be wrong about this again. The firm has made to many mistakes in the last few quarters.

The firm has a big chance in the OEM platformance market. The new AMD plans to sell the whole kit and kaboodle. It will offer the OEMs the motherboard, the CPU and a GPU, of course if you buy the holy three you will end up with a saucy discount. This is the biggest point that DAAMIT has against Nvidia and partially against Intel. Intel has been doing this for years, DAAMIT just entered to this monopolistic way of thinking.

It pays off if you are big company, as you sell more chips and components. The bad thing is that you make your previous chipset and component partners lives a bit more difficult. Long term, Nvidia will suffer from this, especially on the chipset side. Via already suffered as well as plucky little SIS. Things won't be great for Marvell, Silicon Images, as DAAMIT might want to do more and more of these motherboard controller chips and integrate many features into its future chipsets. That's what Nvidia did as this increases the value of your chipsets and earns you more buck per chipset.

AMD needs the money but we think that despite losing out in the prestigious R600 market and handing the CPU market crown to over to Intel's Core 2 Duo the company is about to come back. By the middle of Q2 things will finally start to look better for new AMD. Charlie is right, you should look further away to R700 for graphics and Barcelona and Budapest are doomed to succeed. If not, a new history of semiconductor is about to be written. µ