Intel Core 2 Duo Launch Tomorrow, Sans ATI
An interesting tid-bit just came in over the wire and I thought I would share this with you all. Someone was kind enough to point me in the direction of Voodoo PC CEO, Rahul Sood's blog that has an interesting post about Intel's launch event tomorrow and the inevitable lack of ATI hardware.
So, there's an upcoming launch event for Conroe as many of you know. We're very excited to launch our Conroe systems at the event - and we were supposed to have a system on stage with ATi. Apparently this isn't happening anymore - ATi has been removed from the event and I suspect that Intel is changing the configurations of all the machines based on the feedback I've been hearing. I don't understand the reasoning behind this - because we all know that ATi Crossfire works on the 975 chipset and there's no doubt in my mind that we will sell a ton of Crossfire configurations with Intel Core 2 Duo. ATi will continue to make chipsets for Conroe configurations (at least for the current generation) so it's too bad it had to end like this."
Alrighty then, let's take a step back and breathe this all in... Frankly, I would offer that this is much ado about nothing. Obviously the hope is that Intel doesn't completely discourage the use of ATI Graphics hardware with their products but rather continues to foster an "open platform" approach that supports multi-vendor solutions, just as the entire industry has for an eternity now. But would they showcase the competition's (ATI is now one with AMD) products in demo systems at a launch event, when they could very well go with another solution?
Let's be realists here, it rarely pays to be anything but, especially in business. The cold fact of the matter is that every dollar out of AMD/ATI's pocket now, is directly proportional to an incoming dollar in Intel's pocket. That's the result of a simple, competitive business environment. No rocket science there. Does Intel want AMD to sell more ATI Graphics cards? Absolutely not. Would they prohibit or impede ATI cards from having full support in their future architectures? That would be bad business as well because it would limit the consumer to a more closed platform.
There's no question the weeks and months ahead will get interesting, but an Intel launch event is hardly a shade of things to come... at least in my humble opinion anyway.
