ATI Technologies sees majority of notebooks shipped this Summer to feature PCI Express bus, the company said at a press conference. The forecast mainly reflects ATI’s expectations in Intel’s ability to ramp up shipments of its next-gen flavour of Intel Centrino – the code-named Sonoma platform and Alviso chipsets.

About 60% - 70% of laptop computers supplied this Summer to the market will sport innovative PCI Express bus, according to ATI Technologies’ expectations. Currently there are virtually no notebooks with PCI Express, but the company says the transition to the new interconnection will be relatively fast as market leader Intel Corp. launches its PCI Express-supporting code-named Alviso-series chipsets this month and leading designers of graphics processors are expected to support the core-logic products with fresh lineup of PCI Express visual processing units, according to details revealed at ATI’s press-conference in Taiwan.

Still, ATI did not say which part of PCI Express notebooks shipped later this year will feature dedicated graphics processors in general and what part of them will feature ATI PCI Express VPUs in particular.

Intel Corp.’s forthcoming Intel Centrino mobile platform code-named Sonoma is focused on bringing high-end multimedia and technology features to mobile users, such as higher-speed microprocessors, PCI Express interconnection, DDR2 memory, DirectX 9.0 graphics, high-definition audio, etc..

DigiTimes web-site also quoted ATI Technologies executive Rick Bergman as saying that, PCIe-enabled desktops would account for 50% of global desktop shipments by the middle of this year and will continue to advance to 90% by year-end.

So far Markham, Ontario-based ATI Technologies has shipped over 4 million visual processing units, which accounts for about 80% market share in the segment.