by Anna Filatova
02/13/2002 | 06:39 PM
As we have already reported, ATI is going to significantly reduce its influence on the graphics cards market, focusing only on the graphics chips. The burden of providing the market with the graphics cards based on ATI chips will be placed on ATI’s partners. Some sources claim that ATI is planning to reduce the graphics cards share it ships on its own chips down to only 10% by the end of the year.
Some new moves in this direction were undertaken by ATI not so long ago. According to this site, ATI discontinued RADEON 7200 and RADEON 7500 graphics cards. However, the RADEON 7200 and 7500 chips still keep shipping to the third graphics card manufacturers. <%BANNER[article]%>
This way, ATI is now producing only the slowest graphics solution from RADEON 7000 family, which enjoy great popularity in the OEM market, high-performance RADEON 8500 solution with 64MB and 128MB memory and ALL IN WONDER RADEON 8500 DV multimedia combines.
ATI’s major partners, such as Hercules and Gigabyte will start shipping their RADEON 7500, RADEON 7500 LE and ALL IN WONDER RADEON 7500 graphics cards in the nearest future. RADEON 7200 family will be little by little ousted from the market, as this chip, like RADEON 7500 is based on R100 core, so that both solutions have similar features.