ATI

Apart from a small FireGL booth, separate from the components section of the show, ATI had no actual stand in the halls themselves (although, they did have a Pavilion office located on the top of Hall 1 if you managed to search hard enough!). Part of the reason for this was to ensure that their newly acquired board partners are pushed more into the limelight as ATI increasingly withdraws from the board market. ATI still haven't completely withdrawn from the board market as they still operate in North America, bringing the higher end 'PRO' variants to the market branded as ATI boards, so in some ways ATI are still competing against their own vendors. However, in Europe ATI have withdrawn and, being a European show, the focus needs to be on the vendors who'll be responsible for bringing products here. If ATI had a large presence at the show it could send out a diluted and confused message at this point in time.

ATI's board vendors are enjoying ATI's fairly strong product line. The Radeon 9500 and 9700 class products are still very attractive and selling well, and ATI have just refreshed their line with the newer 9600 and 9800 products -- Radeon 9600 was still conspicuous by its absence, but several board vendors had their own samples of 9800 class products on show, although these are unlikely to be available before April. I sat down and chatted with PowerColor's Nick Ho to discuss their forthcoming line. Naturally PowerColor expect to have a full complement of the new products and possibly, Nick informs me, a variant of Radeon 9800 with 400MHz RAM. PowerColor have adopted Beyond3D as one of their primary review sites and we hope to bring you more PowerColor reviews of their latest products over the coming weeks and months.

Another reason for ATI not having a full show presence was that they would be holding a Press Conference as well. This one I did manage to attend (despite making me miss my coach back to the airport), and, following on from the similarly timed announcements on all the new desktop parts from both ATI and NVIDIA, it turned out to be the public announcement of their new mobile part: Mobility Radeon 9600.

ATI's New Mobility Radeon Range

ATI introduced a number of new mobile parts at CeBit, which transitions their entire mobile line. The first part to be introduced was the Radeon IGP 7000M for Pentium4 mobile solutions. ATI have upgraded the video support in their IGP Northbridge part to include an integrated Radeon 7500 class graphics processor, where the IGP previously included the older Radeon VE class graphics. The Northbridge has also been upgraded to support DDR333. As the Radeon 7500 contains a number of bandwidth saving features, such as Z compression and Hierarchical Z-Buffering, coupled with the DDR333 RAM this can offer gaming performance to within 75% of an equivalent discrete mobile solution.

The Radeon IGP 7000M is pin compatible with their previous IGP 340, meaning that notebook vendors should easily be able to transition from the previous IGP to this one and offer greater performance. The IGP 7000M also offers support for discrete mobile graphics as well, so that a line of notebook solutions can be produced with the IGP 7000M as the chipset core and varying levels of video performance can be offered in that line. If a discrete video chip is used this will disable the integrated graphics -- ATI are even in the process of having tentative talks with notebook manufacturers about the possibility of upgradeable notebook video solutions. One day it may almost be a possibility to purchase a notebook and then go back to the store sometime later and upgrade the video element, much as we do with desktop discrete solutions today.