And Nintendo's supply efforts continue unabated today, as news coming in from the Eastern hemisphere places both Sunplus Technology Co., Ltd. and Wistron Corp as potential new suppliers of outsourced components for the Nintendo Wii.

 

Steadily outselling any next-gen console yet drastically short of supply, the Wii is now reinforced with hardware aid from one of Asia's major hardware manufacturing countries, Taiwan. With the infrastructure, resources and experience in place for dedicated hardware supply, there's hope that Nintendo could raise their monthly output further to achieve their Q4 goal by late December.

Wistron will soon be joining the likes of Foxconn Technology - a regionally well-known motherboard manufacturer - of the Hon Hai Group to assemble Wii machines, while SunPlus Technologies will continue to share supplies of controller chips for the Wii, together with pre-market supplier PixArt Imaging, Inc.

The first generation of the Nintendo Wii console will be those tendered with the original PixArt controller chip, while SunPlus, together with other potential suppliers, will provide an after-market supply of replacement controller chips which will be prevalent in the reportedly "updated" version of the console. The first batch of these replacement chips are expected to ship this quarter, and local industry analysts point out that the shipment may win SunPlus original manufacturing orders for the Nintendo Wii.

Lite-On was reportedly close to the heels of the two companies, planning to enter Nintendo's orders for power supplies for the new batch of game consoles. If successful, the company well known for their optical drive manufacturing portfolio will diversify Nintendo's options for the console's power supplies, a product line once controlled solely by PS2 and Xbox 360 power supply manufacturer Delta Electronics.

ATI and Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS), makers of chips for game consoles including Xbox 360 and Wii, disclosed that orders are picking up. This according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report.

Based on the report ATI, which supplies the graphics chip for Nintendo's the Wii, was said to have achieved a 5% growth in the sales of its consumer electronic chips. Meanwhile, Pixart Imaging which supplies the Wii remote sensor chipset, reportedly said its chip shipments may reach a million units in August.

SiS, the southbridge chip supplier for the Xbox 360, is also cited in Commercial Times report as saying that orders for their product started picking up from July. This could mean Nintendo is gearing up for an all-out Next-Gen Console War and MS isn't going to roll over and play dead!