Could someone give me the lowdown on ABIT? Are they dying or just changing?

[Recall]

There have been rumours floating over the net for months about the demise of ABIT. Now I know there are a few industry insiders here, and was hoping you could either go some way to quell or deny them.

Here are two links

http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15225

HEXUS.channel can exclusively confirm that Taiwanese technology company abit, which is associated primarily with high-end and gaming mainboards, will stop producing all mainboards at the end of 2008.

HEXUS.channel has confirmed this as fact from sources close to South East Asian distributors, all of which will be notified by their abit sales contacts from today onwards.

Apparently abit will continue to deliver mainboards until the end of the year and will honour RMAs and warranties for three years subsequently

Followed by an interesting post at xtremesystems forums claiming some insider info. This is suggesting that all they are doing is closing the abit department and moving everthing to USI. So we will still get mobo's but the abit brand is to die?

Now I am a avid fan of abit boards, especially as they still to date have the best hardware fan control in the business. Lets also not forget they were the first to introduce softmos and the legendary NF7 amd board!

My source at Abit have told like this regarding latest rumours of engineers and stuff:

You already know that USI is the mother company of Abit. And USI also has a very good development department for mainboards. And two departments make no sense. So they closed the Abit department. And every engineer could change to USI. Most of them done this but some have changed to other companies. USI seems to do a very good job. Since the both departments joined together we got many good BIOS-updates for our boards.

But as I know USI build the boards for IBM since a long time. So they already know what they do. And also the most of our engineers still working for us with the only difference that they now will get their money from USI and not from Abit.

P45 board with DDR3 you have to wait for a long time. The IP45 GT3 will be the last board we will get. First we will receive the other P45/P43 boards. So we only have the IX38 GT3 and the IX48 GT3 at the moment wich supports DDR3. Still everyone want to have DDR2. So we first release the other boards and after this the IP45 GT3.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=3234667