Mobo maker First International give ATI"s A3 chipset its first public outing at Comdex last week. The chipset will support AMD"s Athlon XP processor. ATI has held open the prospect of a PC chipset for some time - ever since it was granted a Pentium 4 bus licence by Intel, in fact. That, plus ATI"s desire to compete with nForce, the Athlon-oriented chipset from its arch-rival, Nvidia, suggested that ATI"s part would support Intel processors. However, internal AMD roadmaps revealed in October that the chipset, codenamed A3, will support AMD"s Athlon and Duron chips, a fact confirmed by the First International demo board. That"s not to say that A3 won"t support the P4 at some point, but AMD"s line-up seems to dominate ATI"s sights at the moment. Perhaps it feels that there"s too much competition in the P4 arena already.