ATI: seizing notebooks

Electronic News, Nov 2, 1998 by Peter Brown

toronto, canada -- In a bid to bring component graphics subsystems down into mainstream notebooks, ATI Technologies will today introduce its second generation of notebook graphics engines, dubbed the Rage Mobility-M and Rage Mobility-P. The move can also be viewed as a drive to beef up the company's share of the notebook graphics market.

Having moved into the number one slot in market share for the desktop PC graphics market, ATI is attempting to seize the notebook market where the company holds a minority market share.

Although the company has strong ties to OEMs and generates its own add-in cards for the desktop PC market, the notebook graphics market is an entirely different animal. Notebooks require a low power and high integration offering which has everything in a single chip that a corporate user wants, as compared to the high-performance desktop or gamers that require only 3-D-regardless of the power or integration. ATI is making use of this by offering low power consumption while trying to deliver what it claims is high-quality graphics performance.

Half The Market Already

Currently NeoMagic holds an approximately 50 percent market share in the graphics segment, according to figures from market research firm In-Stat, and dominates the notebook market in terms of sales. NeoMagic took the position after Chips & Technologies fell behind a product cycle. NeoMagic swooped in and took the OEMs away from C&T and others with its embedded DRAM memory engines.

ATI this time around is offering integrated SDRAM in one of the Rage Mobility accelerators, the Mobility-M. However, ATI declined to point to the differences between an "integrated" memory offering and an "embedded" memory offering. Nor would the company reveal who would be manufacturing the notebook devices for the fabless company. There will be more than one foundry involved, noted Lou Leung, director of mobile component marketing. The manufacturers have to be companies skilled in DRAM manufacturing; otherwise, the parts won't work.

This is not the first notebook offering from ATI, but it is the first with any type of memory added internally, rather than keeping everything either on the board or on an add-in card.

ATI's Rage LT Pro, its initial notebook graphics IC, has found its way into the high end of the market and the company claims it is in seven of the top 12 notebook OEMs' machines at the high end, and even in some notebooks below the $2,000 price point. Considering that ATI was not in the notebook market a little more than one year ago, its market share gain has been significant.

DVD Included

The new devices feature ATI's 2-D and 3-D performance but also include hardware DVD, TV-out and dual LVDS transmitters. The Rage Mobility-M also features the 4MB of SDRAM that the Rage Mobility-P does not. The Rage Mobility-M and -P are sampling with production slated to begin in 1Q99 priced at $39 and $32, respectively, in 10,000-unit quantities. ATI said it is also working on an 8MB SDRAM chip for the integrated Mobility engine.

The 3-D portion of the device is very important, noted Mr. Leung, because of the sea of changes taking effect on the Internet, specifically the move to enable 3- D graphics and images on the Internet with Microsoft's Chromeffects software.

Mercury Research said 72 percent of desktop PCs in 2Q98 shipped with 3-D hardware inside. Soon low and mid-range PCs will also feature integrated 3-D as well as low-end notebooks, which should all have 3-D by 1999. This means that the high end will have full-featured 3-D, meaning significant opportunities for ATI to expand its presence in the notebook market while competing for current sockets.

However, this also gives NeoMagic, as well as Trident Microsystems, S3 and C&T, the opportunity to move into these markets.