14 DAY TRIAL // As a newly AMD acquired company, ATI has problems of its own under the new ownership. The Canadian company had to reschedule the RD600 chipset to launch in October (originally planned for August). Asian sources comment that the chipset that has to power the Intel platform experiences a cold welcome from motherboard makers. They claim that they showed considerable interest in supporting the RD600, but seeing that ATI delays the chipset's launch because of technical problems, Asian mobo makers abandoned their initial support as rumor had it that AMD could discontinue or reduce the RD600 supply.
Intel stipulated in its license agreement with ATI that it will limit the front-side bus clock speed to 1066 Mhz and ATI might be unable to line up chipsets supporting the upcoming 1333MHz FSB clock specifications that will be adopted next year. Because of this little incident, ATI let all the motherboard makers know that it won't develop any support for Intel-based platforms in the future.
Digitimes website presents an all-confident ATI that confirms an October launch, while claiming that the chipset has received enough support from many motherboard makers. ATI has never heard of negative responses from motherboard partners regarding the RD600 chipset.
On the other hand, the Inquirer presents ATI partners complaining about the lack of Canadian support. ATI seems to have limited resources for this project and it could be that AMD is interfering with directives that do not allow many ATI people to work on unprofitable ventures. RD600 is said to be an even faster and better overclocker than Intel's 975 chipset.
The whole issue isn't yet clear and ATI has yet to prove consistency and business stability with its awaited RD600 chipset.