Standing at the mercy of its sole chip vendor, Sapphire is changing gears
In the consumer graphics world, the ongoing tug of war between ATI and NVIDIA for performance supremacy continues to be waged on a daily basis -- and not just between the two companies' chips, but between the board manufacturers that use them. Among manufacturers however, there are those that just produce cards exclusively for either ATI or NVIDIA, not both. These include players such as BFG, PowerColor, Sapphire and XFX.
The interesting problem between the above four companies isn't that they produce products based on ATI or NVIDIA cards, it's that they only produce products on either ATI or NVIDIA, but not both. Because of a high reliance on the graphics chip companies that feed silicon to them, exclusive one-chip only companies are at the mercy of their supplier. If a NVIDIA board partner has to wait for products and is delayed, it suffers. If it NVIDIA's chip begin losing to competition, the board manufacturer suffers. The same of course applies to ATI. This is something multi-vendor companies like ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI avoid very successfully.
Interestingly, one-vendor board manufacturers however, may become an outgoing breed soon. In a recent interview with Sapphire's CEO, Hexus asked several questions on whether or not Sapphire was happy being a one-vendor company, and what its plans are going forward. Surprisingly, Sapphire's CEO K.D. Au responded that Sapphire may not be sticking with ATI only products for very much longer. From the interview:
HEXUS: What’s your biggest weaknesses as a company?
KD: Single-source suppliers; it is bad for any business to be dependant on a single supplier. Take our business, our primary business is producing and selling discrete graphics boards based on ATI GPUs. If the market trends aren't in ATI's favour and NVIDIA is ahead then this, obviously, can hurt us. Also, if ATI can't deliver in volume this hurts us, too. The best thing which we can do is make sure we aren't dependant on a single supplier or SKU.
Clearly, the direction that Sapphire is taking is ensuring that it doesn't become crippled by sticking all of its eggs into one basket. Au stated that he would like to see Sapphire offer a wider range of entertainment and multimedia products -- essentially encompassing consumer electronics and home entertainment. The focus is on brand recognition and brand respect.
Several years ago, Diamond Multimedia won the hearts of consumers and enthusiasts alike, despite carrying similar and often identical products to the competition. Of course, the Diamond MM brand is nowhere as strong and prevalent today as it once was. I sorely miss my Diamond Monster 3D -- one of the first 3dfx accelerator.
"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates
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