The cooperation between UMC and AMD keeps expanding day by day. After agreeing on the construction of a joint fab for 12-nch wafers and moving the production of 0.13micron Barton processor cores into UMC’s fabs, a new move followed. According to the info posted in The Taiwanese Commercial Times, UMC is going to enter the chipset market with its own solution for AMD CPUs.

One of UMC’s divisions, Integrated Technology Express Inc. (ITE) announced their plans concerning the development of a chipset for AMD processors. AMD has already approved of these plans and now ITE has passed over to the actual development stage. However, as one of AMD’s officials stated, ITE hadn’t yet reported any details about the new solution and due date.

I would like to point out that the competition in the chipset market segment dealing with solutions for AMD CPUs is getting more and more tense day by day. Such companies as VIA, SiS, ALi, NVIDIA and ATI are laying themselves out trying to get another small bit of the market. So, I wouldn’t be so sure that one more manufacturer, ITE, will succeed in winning a part of the market easily. However, on the other hand, UMC, represented by ITE here, has already had a very rich experience in developing and selling chipsets. They used to develop and sell successfully their x386 and x486 chipsets until 1996, when they were forced to discontinue their products because of some patent infringement lawsuits brought by Intel. Later they settled this conflict with Intel, but ITE still failed to introduce a competitive product for Pentium platform. Well, now we should just wait a little bit to see if ITE will succeed in resuming the chipset business, where its name has been nearly forgotten already.