Sapphire Technology () is a

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

-based technology company, founded in 2001, which produces

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

s for

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

s and

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

motherboard A motherboard (also called mainboard, main circuit board, mb, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, logic board (only in Apple computers) or mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expand ...

TV tuner card A TV tuner card is a kind of television tuner that allows television signals to be received by a computer. Most TV tuners also function as video capture cards, allowing them to record television programs onto a hard disk much like the digital vi ...

digital audio player A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored o ...

s and

LCDTV Liquid-crystal-display televisions (LCD TVs) are television sets that use liquid-crystal displays to produce images. They are, by far, the most widely produced and sold television display type. LCD TVs are thin and light, but have some disadvanta ...

s Sapphire's products are based on

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

s, and both

(

ATI Ati or ATI may refer to: * Ati people, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines **Ati language (Philippines), the language spoken by this people group ** Ati-Atihan festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines *Ati language (China), a ...

) and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

chipset In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components An electronic component is any basic discrete device or physical entity in an electronic system used to affect electrons or their associated fields. Electronic components are ...

technology. The company is the largest supplier of

-based video cards in the world.'Welcome to the SAPPHIRE Family' at Sapphiretech.com
/ref> Sapphire was the first company to release a video card with a high definition multimedia interface (

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a display controller, ...

) connector. Sapphire was the first company to release a video card having

clock speed In computing, the clock rate or clock speed typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses, which are used to synchronize the operations of its components, and is used as an indicator of the pr ...

of 1000 MHz (1 GHz) with the release of the Sapphire Atomic Edition HD 4890.

Manufacturing facilities

As of 2007, Sapphire has two

ISO 9001 The ISO 9000 family is a set of five quality management systems (QMS) standards that help organizations ensure they meet customer and other stakeholder needs within statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service. ISO 90 ...

and

ISO 14001 ISO 14000 is a family of standards related to environmental management that exists to help organizations (a) minimize how their operations (processes, etc.) negatively affect the environment (i.e. cause adverse changes to air, water, or land); (b ...

-certified manufacturing facilities in

Dongguan, China Dongguan (; ) is a prefecture-level city in central Guangdong Province, China. An important industrial city in the Pearl River Delta, Dongguan borders the provincial capital of Guangzhou to the north, Huizhou to the northeast, Shenzhen to the so ...

, which have a monthly production capacity of 1.8 million video cards. The manufacturing facility had an area of about 250,000 m² used by 16 independent production lines as of May 2005.

Manufacturing process

Sapphire buys

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...

s (PCB) from an external contractor, but they place components on the PCB and reflow them in their own factories.

GPUs have historically been used in their products.

Gallery

11127-45 HD3650 1GHM512MBDDR2 PCIE C02.jpg, Radeon HD 3650 ATI HD4870.JPG, Radeon HD 4870 Sapphire Radeon HD 5450-front oblique PNr°0383.jpg, Radeon HD 5450 Sapphire Radeon R9 290X-front oblique PNr°0436.jpg, Radeon R9 290X

References

External links

*{{official website, http://www.sapphiretech.com/ 2001 establishments in Hong Kong Graphics hardware companies Motherboard companies Electronics companies of Hong Kong Hong Kong brands