ATI Technologies’ marketing chief in Taiwan said that the company was looking forward to adopt the 45nm process technology of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. by 2008, which means that ATI and its new owner AMD will produce their chips using similar nodes, but using different fabrication processes.

During a press conference dedicated to the launch of ATI’s first 80nm graphics processing unit – Radeon X1950 Pro also known as the RV570 – the company said that production using the 80nm process technology is 10% - 15% cheaper compared to 90nm manufacturing process and also announced that “by the [end of] first half of 2007”, ATI aims for its complete lineup of its graphics chips to adopt a 80nm node, reports DigiTimes web-site.

The company also said that it was looking to adopt 45nm process technology as early as in 2008. Besides, the firm said that it has been testing 65nm process technology since mid-2006, but did not elaborate when it intends to deploy TSMC’s 65nm fabrication process commercially. The firm said that adoption of 80nm process tech – a derivative or the so-called optical shrink of TSMC’s 90nm fabrication technology – took ten to eleven months.

It is unclear which series of ATI Technologies' graphics processors will be made using 45nm process technology, but the most likely candidates are the ATI R700- or ATI R800-series.

It is interesting to note that ATI’s owner Advanced Micro Devices said that it would use 45nm process technology in 2008 to produce chips that would integrate graphics and general-purpose processing capabilities.