David Orton, the president and COO of ATI Technologies, yesterday shed some light on the company’s intentions both in short term and long term future. Representative of Markham, Ontario-based graphics and multimedia chips design house said that his company continues to consider consumer-electronics market as a very prospective one.

Mr. Orton said that ATI’s sales will be boosted by devices like PDAs, mobile phones, STBs and digital TVs this [calendar?] year, thus, expect more products for handhelds from ATI since currently the company’s portfolio of such devices only consists of a very few chips. Additionally, ATI wants to capture larger share in the market of integrated chipsets. Orton agrees with his rivals from NVIDIA Corporation and also tells us that this year is going to be successful for graphics processors.

What you really want to know now is when ATI Technologies will beat its arch-rival again in the high-end graphics market. David Orton told on Wednesday that the company will launch its new highest-end graphics chip this Fall. According to Orton, it will overshadow NVIDIA GeForce FX Ultra Ultra that was announced earlier this month.

To tell you the truth, I do now know what does ATI Technologies’ COO and President mean by “new highest-end chip”. Is that R360 that we told you about some time ago (see this news-story), or is that the highly-acclaimed R400? We will need to find everything out, but at this point I doubt this will be R400 given that it is not yet taped out and we should not expect it earlier than in November with real sales starting in December or even January.

Orton also said that his company did not feel substantial impact from SARS outbreak, but weak USD causes some losses currently.