Neither ATI Technologies nor NVIDIA Corporation can supply sufficient number of their graphics processors to the market, according to a report submitted by DigiTimes Taiwanese web-site.

It is said that ATI Technologies supplies its graphics processors to large OEMs first and that affects AIB’s business since their manufacturing capacities are not fully utilised. It is estimated that Gigabyte Technology, CP Technology and Info-Tek Corporation (ITC) (selling its products under the GigaCube brand-name), are able to obtain only 50% of the chips they order, whereas companies like HP, Dell, IBM, NEC and others get the graphics chips in sufficient quantities.

Currently ATI cannot supply sufficient number of higher-end RADEON 9500/9700 as well as RADEON 9800-series of graphics processors to the add-in-board partners. That is a pity for the company since now there are very few GeForce FX 5600 and GeForce FX 5800-based products on the market and this is a chance for ATI to increase its market share in retail market segment.

Several sources also indiacated NVIDIA GeForce4 Titanium GPU shortages.

The numbers of graphics processors supplied to AIB companies and OEMs are not indicated in the report. One thing I can point out for sure is that if there were more performance graphics chips from ATI on the market, it would not only positively affect ATI’s overall market share, but also ATI’s gross-margin and revenue. The same can basically be said about NVIDIA.

ATI Technologies today confirmed that the demand for ATI graphics processor is so high that the company cannot fulfill all the requests. The company acknowledged that the situation is improving. Based on my expectations (see this news-story), the whole issue will be resolved sometimes in the second half of the calendar year, however, it is for sure that the AIB manufacturers will receive more graphics processors in the short-term future as well.