(Column) - People are apparently finding the ULi acquisition by NVIDIA surprising, but I believe it was long due and somewhat expected. Given that ULi mostly plays the value game, they make excellent southbridges. Their SATA II chips are to die for and of course, they are a major supplier to ATI. In fact, if you think about it, they perhaps know as much about Crossfire architecture as ATI. They are possibly even aware of ATI’s strategies with its motherboard division and upcoming products considering ULi’s involvement in ATI’s products.

Another thing that made ULi standout was hybridizing AGP and PCIe slots on the same board. NVIDIA will probably be launching an AGP version of the 7800 series called the 7800GS. ULi would come in handy here again. According to ULi, you can simultaneously use AGP, PCI and PCIe graphics card to power multiple monitors, so if NVIDIA was to target a value AGP crowd, I’m certain the market will expect a complete bundle at a reasonable cost.

Come to think of it, assuming I can use different technologies here, I could have a host of monitors all around me. This would be a gift for designers and multi-taskers. Working with ULi, NVIDIA could devise a solution where the heavy-load processing happens on a Quadro, but gets sent to different displays. That would be a nice solution.

Again, looking at the AMD market, there are really three players worth your money when searching for a chipset: ATI, NVIDIA and ULi.

Obviously, ATI chipsets are heavily dependent on ULi for the southbridge and NVIDIA acquiring ULi could yield significant problems for ATI (maybe not contractually, but ULi revealing insider secrets). We all know the paper launch of the X1800, which is now beginning to ship and is not exactly available in substantial quantities. Could it be that the new versions of the Xpress 200 will have problems with shipping as well due to the lack of a decent southbridge partner (assuming NVIDIA doesn’t renew ATI’s contract?). Either that or ATI needs to hurry up and work out the kinks in its own southbridge chips to avoid that situation altogether.

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