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Company Name: ATI

Description: ATI Technologies Inc. is among the large companies involved in the development and manufacture of mainboards, graphics processing units (GPUs), video/graphics cards, and chipsets. The company was established in 1985 by Lee Ka Lau, Benny Lau and Kwok Yuen Ho.

It was initially named Array Technologies Inc. The name of the company was later shortened to ATI.

The company mainly operated as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) during the mid 1980s. At around this time, ATI had produced graphics cards intended for integration into manufacturers of computers such as Commodore and IBM.

Two years after its inception, the company had become a graphics retailer carrying independent brands including the VGA Wonder as well as the EGA Wonder lines of video cards.

ATI’s Mach8 was released during the early 1990s. It was the company’s first graphics processing unit that functioned independently from the computer’s CPU. Less computing load is then given to the CPU’s processor because the graphics are handled by the Mach8 itself thereby improving the performance and speed of the computer to process digital video/graphical data.

Also during the early 1990s, ATI launched the Mach32. This product’s graphical interface offered faster performance and better bandwidth.

The company became publicly listed at the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1993. It had also listed its stocks at the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Questions or NASDAQ.

Improvements were made on the Mach series in 1994 and soon after, ATI released Mach64. The Mach64 employs the early methods of graphics acceleration that were hardware-based. It was during this period that ATI developed the 3D Rage, one of the company’s popular products. The 3D Rage is based on the Mach64 and is a combination of 3D and 2D acceleration graphics processors.

Among the other developments in the Rage product line was the Rage Pro, an alternative to one of ATI’s competitors in the business of graphics processors called 3Dfx Voodoo. 1999 saw ATI bring an edge to the product line Rage when the company released the DirectX 6.0 accelerator, also referred to as Rage 128.

The company had been the first to develop graphics/video cards that are capable of employing television as a means to display computer graphics as an alternative to the standard computer monitors. The graphics chip and TV tuner integration turned out to be the All-in-Wonder product line. It included ATI’s notable products such as the 3D Rage. A computer that is equipped with the graphics card All-in-Wonder is also capable of capturing to the hard drive analog video and stereo TV audio.

ATI purchased the developer of the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo GameCube chips called ArtX in 2000. Microsoft had also contracted the company to develop graphics chips for its gaming console, the Xbox 360.

In mid 2000, ATI announced its merger with Advanced Micro Devices Inc., a semiconductor company. After the deal was finalized in October of the same year, ATI still retained the trademarks for the subsequent product line of ATI/AMD.

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