NEWS - Thursday, June 2, 2005

ATI Wants To Work With Microsoft
ATI wants to continue working with Microsoft But the decision rests with Microsoft for various reasons ATI has hinted that it wants to partner with Microsoft for the long haul following its involvement on the companys next-generation games console, Xbox 360, which is due to ship later this year with an ATI graphics part at its core. "Our view is that when we enter a partnership like Xbox with Microsoft, its not a one-shot. Its really a launch on a long-term partnership," said ATI CEO Dave Orton, speaking to Reuters during a technology seminar in Taipei. Orton said he sees ATI starting "to look much more like a PC/digital consumer company, not a PC company thats dabbling in digital consumer" - from which its easy to infer that ATI would like to produce the next round of graphics technology for Microsoft whenever the latter next decides to iterate its gaming platforms. But Ortons comments also suggest ATI wants to partner on more than simply gaming consoles. Microsoft has made no secret of its keenness to expand in various multimedia sectors, and Orton thinks ATI can be a part of that too, identifying an opportunity "to do much more together in a range of devices". "Thats what we want to do because we believe this technology is ultimately redeployable in different forms," he added. "Thats what we hope ultimately Microsoft will decide." However ATI is relying on Microsoft to support it, to a certain extent, as the Redmond-based computing giant reportedly owns the designs and rights to all Xbox 360 components, including ATIs chip. Therefore, should it choose to stop working with ATI, Microsoft is unlikely to run into the sorts of problems it did moving away from its first-generation Xbox partnership with NVIDIA, whose ownership of the graphics processing unit design gave Microsoft a headache when it came to ensuring backwards compatibility in 360 - an issue it has still to resolve completely.Source: http://www.gameindustry.biz