We met with Niles S. Burbank, Product Marketing Manager, and Vincent K Win, VP of Strategic Sales, at ATi's private suite on the 26th floor of the Grand Hyatt.

The Desktop market is owned right now by ATi. The chances are that if you bought a system last year, more likely than not, the graphics controller was probably an ATi based one. The Rage 128 chipset has had a tremendous success in OEM and their new Rage 128 'Pro' part will likely experience the same kind of reception. The Rage 128 Pro, in layman's terms, is a Rage 128 clocked to higher frequencies. At this time we do not have any benchmarks for you. The company does project a 50% leap in performance in 32-bit color once the part ships in late Q2.

By the end of the year, we expect 'gaming notebooks' to be powered by strong mobile 2D/3D chipsets. ATi's current generation of LT chipsets are still not quite in the ballpark, being very similar in architecture to the Rage Pro chipset. We were told to 'expect a next generation announcement' by the end of summer (the Rage 128 for mobiles?). Nevertheless, it's currently the best graphics chipset available in the mobile market. The newer LTs will soon have integrated memory to reduce power consumption and compatibility with the new ultra-thin line of notebook PCs. Expect to see support for KMPS and DFP for LCD displays.

Arguably any Computex Innovation Award (if there were one) should go to AZZA for their clever AIRBus technology. AIRBus is a new device that is no bigger than a matchbox, which plugs into your motherboard (there's also an external version). By using ROM memory it can be used for BIOS recovery and upgrading, debugging and network client connection. Just think- your motherboard's BIOS gets crunched by the CIH Virus. No problem, just slot in an AIRBus and re-flash the BIOS.