ATI cerebrates 20 years of companyHappy birthday ATIATI Boys are growing oldBy Fuad Abazovic: Friday 04 March 2005, 17:16ARRAY TECHNOLOGY INC, the company much more known as ATI, is ready to celebrate its 20th anniversary. This company is producing graphic things for girls and guys for twenty years now.Its founder, K.Y. Ho, is still the chairman of the company and company now is driven by Dave Orton, the founder of the ARTX Company that ATI bought back in 2000. Dave is an interesting leader and a CEO that actually cares to talk to journos, not something that you will find common in this industry. Not that we blame them.The company changed and grew over the years and had been a leader in graphic before the 3D era than lost its crown to S3 and later 3DFX and Nvidia. However, it managed to get back in the game with its R300, Radeon 9700 series of cards.Before 3D era ATI was the pure leader in 2D card design and was fighting many companies such as Matrox and S3 but didn't listen to the market and jumped too late on the 3D bandwagon.In the spooky times of R300 development ATIs had its last chance to do something and take Nvidia over in 3D high end market. It was running out of money and ATI had to put most of the money from the bank in this chip development. Stakes were high but if ATI failed in this effort company would had to end its career and someone would buy. It could live the destiny of 3DFX. Luckily for the industry R300, Radeon 9700 was good chip and ATI made some serious money with this chip and later with Radeon 9500 series. The Company got back in the game and luckily for ATI, Nvidia failed to deliver wondrous NV30 chip. ATI started climbing even since and is giving Nvidia hard time to run for its money.ATI continued to fight Nvidia with very successful series and ATI has never been stronger than now. Its R420, R430, R480, R410, RV370 are selling good and companies mobile business has never been better. It has new range of AGP chips to put even more pressure on Nvidia. ATI holds more than 60 percent of laptop discrete graphic; it's getting in action with its chipset business and has strong customers such as Motorola for its mobile telephones business. The company managed to make a very important strategic deal with Qualcomm one of the biggest players in mobile phones business. It has to go in many directions to keep its investors happy.ATI is growing constantly; it acquired well known FireGL workstation graphic business but it still hasn't managed to get in big stile at this market. The Company needs to get a product with 32 bit floating point precision and better workstation driver and it will be good to go to fight in this arena as well. R520, codenamed Fudo will bring such a thing in just couple of months. Company is preparing its ATI Multi Rendering, SLI marchitecture ready to fight Nvidia as well. This should happen rather sooner than later.ATI is also very strong in set top box market and multimedia market as company is earning some significant revenues from those businesses as well.The company entered console business with Nintendo deal and now plans to expand it with upcoming XboX 2 deal, Microsoft works closely with ATI on Avalon graphic interface for Longhorn and partnership with Microsoft has never been stronger.Now with revenues over 2 billion dollars and more than 2200 employees company stands dedicated to continue its eternal fight with Nvidia. Good luck to you girls and boys and we wish you to have a happy 20 years anniversary. We hope that we will be welcome on your 30th anniversary as well. And so ends the history of the world according to Fudo. µ
