Reader Interview: ATI's President & COO Dave Orton

Future

Will ATI consider licensing its chips to 3rd party video card makers?  Do they think that 3dfx's reluctance to do this attributed to their demise? Might driver development issues we are seeing here be attributed to not having other developers working on them also like NVIDIA does. I can see keeping the OEM contracts with-in ATI but not licensing to 3rd parties doesn't seem to be effective to me at least.

A. ATI was one of the first vertically integrated graphics companies that developed its own chips as well as its own board products, and this business model has enabled ATI to become a leader in the industry.  Other graphics companies have attempted to copy this model, but they haven't met with much success.  Among other things, using 3rd party board manufacturers introduces many organizational difficulties, and makes it hard to maintain a consistent level of product quality unless you exercise strict control.  And if you force all the 3rd parties to use your hardware and software reference designs, that leaves cost as the only meaningful way they can differentiate themselves, meaning they have to cut corners and deliver sub-par products.  At ATI we already have one of the largest and most experienced board design teams in the business, so it really doesn't make sense for us to outsource this to someone else.

ATI recently made a deal for a broad cross-licensing agreement with Intel. What does this mean? What kind of technologies is ATI going to be using from Intel and vice versa?

A. The most important aspect of this deal from ATI's point of view is that it gives us the rights to certain patents required to develop motherboard chipsets that are compatible with Intel processors, as well as the right to actually build them.

What is the ArtX team going to do after Nintendo?

A. As mentioned earlier, they are already working on a next generation high-end graphics product.