$35 million in Xbox royalties in 2005

[Shadow20002]

ATI (Markham, Ontario) announced the deal Thursday (Aug. 14), which has been in negotiations for more than a year. The company will design a semicustom graphics chip, primarily in its Marlborough, Mass., design center for the video game console and charge Microsoft for upfront engineering and per-unit royalties, said Rick Bergman, vice president of marketing for ATI.

For ATI's archrival, Nvidia Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) which supplies graphics chips for the current Xbox on a product basis, the deal represents a loss of up to $350 million in 2005, according to one senior financial analyst. In one recent quarterly report, Nvidia said the Xbox represented nearly 20 percent of its sales.

Bergman would not comment on the graphics technology for the next-generation Xbox. However, the company's Marlborough office is known to be working on ATI's so-called R500 core, the successor to the R400 core now being designed in ATI's Santa Clara office and planned for launch in high-end desktop graphics chips this fall. The R500 is expected to be aimed at the DirectX 10 application programming interface to be used in Longhorn, the next major version of Windows expected to be released in 2005.

Source@

[Knight]

And the R400 core isn't out yet(the 9800 is a R350).