XGI Technology – a graphics startup involving engineers and projects of SiS and Trident – recently said it plans to increase 20-fold its shipments of discrete graphics processors in 2004.

The ambitious company formed in mid-2003 from SiS’ Xabre and Trident’s Graphics divinising has already proposed plans to grab significant market share and to become profitable in about three years time. The company’s sales vice president Ralph Cheng in an interview with DigiTimes web-site said XGI expected its graphics chip shipments to grow more than 20 times in 2004 and reach 4 to 5 million units next year. According to him, chips for notebooks will account only for 10% of the company’s shipments. 

This year XGI is projected to ship about 200 thousands of graphics chips. The majority of products will be intended for notebooks, while the remaining part is designed for desktop PCs. The latter are in general the Volari chips that went into mass production sometime in November 2003.

XGI is currently offering Volari V5 and V8 graphics chips in two speed grades each. Both V5 and V8 GPUs are made using 0.13 micron fabrication process at UMC. To provide more performance and compete with leading graphics processors from ATI or NVIDIA, XGI also offers to install 2 GPUs per one graphics card, a move which efficiency is open for dispute.

Currently there are two companies selling Volari products - Club 3D and CP Technology. However, there are rumours about ASUS, ABIT and Gigabyte to adopt graphics processors from the Taiwan-based startup.

Discrete graphics processors account for a substantial part of all graphics products shipped. According to current expectations, 80 million of discrete graphics chips will be shipped in 2003. According to ATI Technologies’ anticipations, this market is growing together with the overall market of PC components that also includes chipsets with integrated graphics cores – a very serious enemy for low-cost discrete GPUs.