ATI SB600 Coming in May
DigiTimes reports that ATI is officially claiming that their new SB600 southbridge will make its debut in May. With ATI's initial southbridge designs being less than stellar in the eyes of the community, many motherboard vendors chose to opt for a southbridge designed by ULI. With NVIDIA acquiring ULI, many design wins for ATI chipsets were suddenly drawn in question as supply of the ULI southbridge was questionable at best. With ATI's SB600 supposedly being significantly better than previous offerings, seeing this chipset ready in May is music to the ears of ATI fans.
Before Nvidia's takeover, ULi saw the majority of its sales in the latter half of 2005 coming from strong southbridge demand for use with ATI northbridges, at a time when ATI was the first supplier of Pentium 4-based integrated PCI Express chipsets in the entry-level chipset market. After Nvidia's ULi acquisition, Nvidia's strategic plan to stop supplying the ULi M1575 and M1573 southbridge chips, which were bundled with ATI's RC410 chipset, was aimed to discourage motherboard makers from adopting ATI solutions, a March 27 article cited market speculations as indicating.
