Chaintech to Go XGI Route?

by Anton Shilov
12/29/2003 | 06:59 PM

Chaintech, a well-known graphics cards and mainboards manufacturer, sponsors an event of eXtreme Graphics Innovation – a new developer of graphics processors. This may be a sign of an upcoming collaboration between the two Taiwan-based companies.

So far XGI has managed to ink deals with CP Technology and Club 3D companies, who sell XGI Volari Duo-based graphics cards in Asia and Europe. Chaintech, who sponsors some events of Taipei, Taiwan-based graphics firm, may turn out to be a nice AIB partner with trusted sales channels and plethora of resellers all around Europe, Asia and the USA.

Besides, XGI’s web-site also lists ABIT as one of “sponsors”, presumably because the company is also considering adopting graphics chips from the world’s third largest developer of GPUs.

Both ABIT and Chaintech have been close partners of Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA Corporation, who supplied GPUs as well as nForce and nForce2 chipset products – two Socket A chipsets adored by hardware enthusiasts – to the mainboard companies. However, ABIT is likely to perform some changes in its tactic by utilizing graphics silicon from ATI Technologies and XGI.

Chaintech used to supply SiS Xabre-based products in 2002. Xabre subsidiary of Silicon Integrated Systems this year was spun off into XGI.

There are rumors about intentions of ASUS and Gigabyte Technology to adopt graphics processors from the Taiwan-based startup.

XGI expects its graphics chip shipments to grow more than 20 times in 2004 and reach 4 to 5 million units next year. According to the company’s executives, chips for notebooks will account only for 10% of the company’s shipments, while the majority of GPUs will be sold to add-in-card companies. 

No officials commented on the story.