When about half a year ago ATI announced their desire to change the business strategy and started shipping its chips to third graphics cards makers, no one could even imagine that it would go that far. Nevertheless, our reliable sources told us a very interesting news piece today: ATI is going to leave the European retail graphics market.
According to our sources, ATI wills top selling its own graphics cards in Europe in the near future. ATI’s own graphics cards will be first of all replaced by solutions from Hercules, which has an exclusive agreement with ATI. it says that Hercules will be the exclusive supplier of ALL-IN-WONDER graphics card family, including ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON 8500DV, in Europe. Moreover, Hercules will also ship the regular graphics cards built on RADEON 8500 chips.
In fact, taking into account that Hercules doesn’t have its own production lines and the Taiwanese companies are very unlikely to be brave enough to tackle the manufacturing of such complex solutions as ALL-IN-WONDER graphics accelerators, the products selling under Hercules brand name will be just the same as those selling now under ATI brand.
Unfortunately, it also means some delay with the beginning of ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON 8500DV shipments. Hercules will start selling ATI based graphics cards only in February 2002, and it means that we will see no ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON 8500DV graphics cards in Europe until then.
As far as ATI is concerned, the company is going to reduce its presence in the retail market quite significantly. They will continue producing professional FireGL solutions and selling some cards in the USA and Canada where they have a very well built dealer network.
We should also note that even the European OEMs working closely with ATI noticed that the Canadian manufacturer is quite willing to stop shipping its own graphics cards in favour of one of the Taiwanese manufacturers, supposedly Gigabyte.