MSI and ATI caught in cahoots over chipsets

WHEN WE FIRST heard about the ATI and Medion deal, where the latter ordered some serious quantity of cards we began to wonder whether MSI really wanted to start producing ATI based cards as well as its current partner.

We spoke with MSI which said it does not officially have anything to do with ATI and it has no plans to change that position for a while

MSI officials told us that even if it wanted to go for ATI, it simply didn't have the capacity to provide the 12 million cards it sold in 2002.

But we were looking in the wrong direction, because MSI plans to make motherboards based on ATI technology, particularly with the Pentium 4 chipset codenamed right now as the RS300.

RS300 according to a source, said that this chipset will be able to deliver performance even higher than Intel's Canterwood. It's hard to believe that ATI could progress so much in this area but maybe it learnt its mistake from the the Radeon 340 IGP.

Since Nvidia does not have a licence to build a Pentium 4 chipset, and it told us before that $5 is too much to pay for that Intel licence.

MSI is a real victory for ATI but the real negotiations with Nvidia graphics partner still have to take place if ATI wants to reach that famous sweet spot.

Nvidia was always a tad hypesensitive about the way it did business, we've noted before.

MSI will be ready to announce this partnership soon after the new Intel chipsets hit the market. µ