As it was expected, ATI Company has held a press-conference and announced its new chipsets for Pentium 4 and Athlon processors families.

ATI chipsets have a classical architecture: an IGP North Bridge and an IXP South Bridge, which are connected by PCI-bus analogue.

Various North Bridge (IGP) versions look like regular integrated DDR chipsets, which support one-channel DDR266/DDR200 memory, have RADEON 7000 graphics core and support external AGP 4x video-cards. Thus, ATI chipsets will be able to compete only with the most simple integrated solutions from VIA and SiS and won’t be competitive, for instance, with NVIDIA’s nForce chipset.

Although the graphics core, integrated into ATI chipsets, supports HydraVision and HyperZ technologies, and has a hardware acceleration for DVD decoding, it doesn’t have a built-in T&L block, has only one rendering pipeline and is able to process only three texels per clock clock.

The South Bridges (IXP) support Ethernet, 6 USB 2.0 – ports, ATA-100 and six-channel AC’97 sound. All of the above mentioned lets us conclude, that ATI chipsets will have a rather low price.

To be more concrete, we’ll point out, that ATI announced five different North Bridges and two South Bridges, which can be used in various combinations:

• IGP 340. North Bridge with support of 533/400 MHz bus Pentium 4 CPUs
• IGP 340M. The same North Bridge for notebook use
• IGP 330. North Bridge with support of 400 MHz bus Pentium 4 and future Willmette-128 core based Celeron CPUs
• IGP 320. North Bridge with support of Athlon/Duron CPUs families
• IGP 320M. Mobile IGP 320 analogue
• IXP 250. South Bridge, except for basic functions, it has features for remote administration
• IXP 200. Typical South Bridge

FIC and Gigabyte Companies will be the main manufacturers of mainboards, based on ATI chipsets. Arima, Compal and Quanta Companies will announce notebooks, based on mobile chipsets variants. Chipset supplies for Athlon processors will begin in May, and serial production of Pentium 4 chipsets will start by summer.

In the end of the year, ATI is planning to improve its chipsets by adding DDR333 memory support and by changing the graphics core into RADEON 8500, and in 2003-2004 the next, seriously modified, IGP and IXP generations are expected to come out.