ATI to finish Rialto in February

JUST LIKE WE previously reported, ATI will have its bridge chip ready sometime in February.

There is no rush as ATI still has some 9800PRO left to fill the AGP sub $200 mainstream market but stock won't last forever. Still, at some point, ATI has to start bridging its native PCIe chips and to make AGP cards from them.

We were told that X700 might be the first runner up for such a task but we don't expect to see any of the bridged cards until sometime in March. There might be a good possibility that we might see such cards at CeBIT but no one is yet sure about that.

We also heard that at first ATI won't bridge all the cards but we expect some of the existing X800 to come as bridged versions sometimes in the future. We specially think R430 based core might be the right choice for it.

What you should bear in mind is that the ATI bridge chip called Rialto is a PCIe to AGP chip and not vice versa and that AGP upgrade market might live for quite some time. We expect to see AGP cards in the next two years at a minimum. µ