PRECISE DETAILS of ATI"s Xbox 2 are still harder to find than a pin on a 940 Athlon 64, but there"s a while before the console of consoles arrives – like 2005. If you recall, Nvidia was producing a Pentium III hybrid chipset for the original Xbox, strikingly similar to the Nforce chipset Graphzilla later introduced for AMD Athlons with features such as Sound Storm and decent Geforce 3 graphics. Of course, AMD was tipped originally to get the Xbox deal but La Intella didn"t like that potential loss of face. Nvidia sold two chips to Microsoft, one for graphics and one for the chipset but ATI will do something completely different, as the Monty Python refrain goes.
ATI actually bagged a deal where it will simply send the marchitecture to the Vole, while another company will actually make it for the Xbox 2. All ATI is doing is giving away rights to its marchitecture to Microsoft, while Nvidia had the not so pleasant job of designing and then getting the chips made for the Satan of Satans.
So someone needs to make an Xbox 2 motherboard as well, and we speculate that ATI might include its good friends at Sapphire to do that job. It"s just speculation. ATI believes it will make money from the deal, although Nvidia had trouble turning the handle round fast enough to grind the meat to make mince.