by Anna Filatova
02/12/2001 | 11:50 AM
Well, again our news touches upon the notorious RADEON LE card. As we have learnt recently, ATI is not manufacturing these graphics cards. They are made and sold by some other company.
According to ATI representative, this graphics accelerator isn’t an ATI product at all. As you can see from the photos which appeared on AKIBA, there is no ATI logo on these cards. The cards are distributed and supported by Althon Micro Company.
Really, if you take a closer look at the pictures here, you will notice no logo at all, and the inscription saying that the card is "made in China" and not in Canada.
Now it’s clear why ATI isn’t afraid of RADEON LE as a potential competitor to a more expensive RADEON, because RADEON LE turned out not a brand name product but one of the Chinese noname pieces.
In fact, ATI has already got used to selling its chips to China, although they have never officially announced this initiative: the same thing happened to Rage128 a while ago. The labor in China is much cheaper than in Canada that’s why it’s profitable for ATI to sell its chips over there and not to care about them afterwards.