Originally posted by: situman
its funny how the ATI chipset was announced way back and yet Nvidia beat them to market. ATI is catching the AMD syndrome.
Actually, yes it is. That is exactly what is happening. I can explain it in two words:
AMD, Intel.
This is an Intel chipset. Intel has been the choice for Core 2 Duo boards with its monopoly on performance chipsets, 975X and P965 (until 680i just the other day). When word came around that ATI's RD600 was going to beat the socks off of Intel's chips at their own game, Intel didn't just wait for the storm to hit. They took a little tour of Taiwan's best motherboard manufacturers' offices 'encouraging' them to abandon future RD600 plans if they knew what was best for them. The only mobo manufacturer with enough balls to stick to the their own plans was DFI.
Intel didn't want their 'future' (ATI was not AMD at the time, but their merger was official and almost complete) primary rival to have a chipset than ran Intel tech better than their own. Now that would be quite the slap in the face, wouldn't it?
When AMD finally took over ATI 100%, they diminished the engineer muscle on the project even more. Why should they alocate engineers to help design/improve/sell a rival company's product -- especially when the potential support for the chip has just been crippled?
***
... Long story short, Intel got spooked and threatened mobo manufactureres to dump the chipset. AMD knew very much that was going to hurt the chances of survival for the project and so they didn't alocate very many engineers to it. Plus, why root for the other team?
/sad face...
That's why everyone is talking about "DFI RD600" and no other board. DFI is the only, if not one of very very few (no other tier 1's unless they change their mind) left going to produce it. The sad part is that this would have been a great seller for ASUS, ABIT, MSI etc... and would have had killer performance even before 680i had it been on time... Stupid Intel blackmail ..