We received a word about ATI joining the company of Intel, VIA and SIS willing to demonstrate their new chipsets at CeBIT. ATI is expected to introduce two products at once – A3 and A4 chipsets.

Both these chipsets will have similar characteristics, the only difference will be CPU types they support. A3 is intended for both Pentium III and Athlon family, and A4 is designed for Pentium 4 CPUs only. These chipsets have an integrated graphics engine based on RADEON 7000 (RADEON VE) architecture. The graphics SMA engine will use from 4 to 64MB of system memory for graphics data. The chipsets will also support external AGP 4x graphics cards.

As system memory ATI chipsets will support PC2100/CP1600 DDR SDRAM. All the other characteristics of A3 and A4 look rather usual: ATA-100 support, AC’97 sound and 4USB 1.1 ports implemented by a South Bridge from ALi to be used together with North Bridges from ATI.

At CeBIT ATI will also show mainboards based on A3 and A4. Description of the first products of the kind are already available in the web, for example at PCPartner. The major partner of ATI to use A3 and A4 chipsets will most probably become FIC.