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Sapphire CEO Interviewed
Steve from HEXUS writes "How does the battle between ATI and nVidia look from the inside? In his first press interview in four years, CEO of graphics card manufacturing giant Sapphire - add-in-board partner of ATI - talks about what it's like being in the thick of it and how things may pan out for Sapphire in the future."
So do they write their drivers in perl, or in ruby?
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Wow. If this is really an interview with the CEO of the biggest ATI add-in board maker, there's a real opportunity for someone to land a role as his PR minder...
He admits to Sapphire being weak in Asia and Turkey, talks openly about ATI's problems and his reliance on them being a weakness, suggests he's going to move into Nvidia parts too and then says he want to shift the firm from being an AIB maker to a "multimedia company".
Sell, sell, sell would be a sensible shareholder reaction.
But maybe it's his first interview in 4 years because he has good marketing people and they've successfully managed to keep him away from the journalists for that long?
We are getting screwed by ATI's supply issues and will probably start marking nVidia cards soon, as well as other products.
You say you want a revolution....
Nice interview, refreshingly honest and without a trace of the PR droidism and jargon that makes most interviews with guys in his position meaningless. So he's not 100 per cent redhot-wedded to ATI and may "go green" at some stage? As he says, dependence on a single supplier is a risk and a weakness. It's especially good to hear him say "everything is down to the people; without them a company is nothing" when most other executives babble about outsourcing and the digital lifestyle, meaning they've fired everyone they can lay their hands on, done a deal with a call center outfit in Bangalore and bought themselves a new Ferrari on the proceeds.
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Very short article, and i honestly dont care too much about sapphire, but it was very refreshing to read an interview that wasnt essentially an advertisement. The man actually answered the questions... a rare thing indeed.
EVEN ON WINDOWS, the latest ATI drivers (for the last year or so) for my AIW TV tuner BARELY work (i.e. if I shut down every single thing I have running in the background and coax the crap out of it, it's barely watchable). Even though the stock drivers that came with it worked fine three years ago. And I would use the stock drivers, except the 3D end is simply out of date. Even their modern 3D drivers aren't as polished as they could be (like why do I need the
I always bought ATI stuff because I thought their visual quality was a little better than nVidia, and still do. But I probably won't buy anymore ATI stuff because they've been SO inconsiderate of the Linux crowd, and can't even get their Win32 drivers right. I realize it might not be so profitable for them, but they still could have done some things to move the opensource front along a little bit...
Every Sapphire card I've ever owned burned out within six months. Can't blame ATI for that.