| A
few months ago, ATI made a bold announcement that
they wanted to dominate the high-end consumer 3D
graphics card market.
Although ATI is already the largest
graphics board manufacturer in the industry, their
products have never had superior performance as
far as Gaming and 3D Graphics were
concerned. Their feature sets were very
complete, but competing products from NVidia and
3dfx consistently outperformed ATIs products at
the time. Even
though on paper some of ATIs products
seemed powerful enough to compete, in real world
testing, incompatibilities or driver inadequacies
held them back.
April 2000 was set
to be the time ATI unleashed information on the
public outlining the Radeon architecture and
feature set.
No more was ATI to play a 3D second
fiddle to their competitors.
It was time to take over.
Our initial excitement about the Radeon was
evident in
our first editorial and recently we had an
opportunity to travel to ATIs headquarters in
Toronto, Ontario, Canada to experience the technology first
hand and judge for ourselves, whether or not
ATI could grab the poll position in this race.
Upon arrival, we
fully anticipated to be bombarded with Radeon
"propaganda" but that anticipation
subsided immediately in our meeting.
ATI wanted to not only demonstrate their
new killer product but also show other
initiatives to enter and dominate other markets
like set-top boxes, integrated chipsets and the
mobile arena (where they already are a major force
with 41% notebook market share and 31% total
market share as of Q1 2000). While speaking with project leaders, we could feel their
excitement. They
are confident the new direction the company is
taking will have positive results.
ATI already has
design wins with companies like Sony and GI for
high-end HDTV capable set top boxes.
We viewed a compelling demonstration of
this prototype
This
product was capable of some cool tasks.
We saw a 3D Tetris-type game being played,
a Web TV-like demonstration and perfect HDTV
output (you can see the large HDTV set to the
left, in the above pic).
To show off the power of this prototype, we
also saw what Id describe as real-time video
texture mapping.
In the above
picture what youre seeing is a video signal
from a camera being mapped onto the kettle in
real-time.
ATIs integrated
chipset (the S370) was also demonstrated to us.
We didnt have any real hands on
experience to tinker with the hardware but rather
a side-by-side comparison with an Intel i810
system with the integrated i750 graphics core.
ATIs chip is a 128-bit product, priced
to compete with the i810 and on similarly equipped
550mhz PIIIs the S370 not only consistently
outperformed Intels, but visual quality was
much betterthe difference was like night and
day. The
sub-$1000 PC market is about to get a much-needed
shot in the arm.
An IBM ThinkPad
with integrated Rage Mobility M1 was also
demonstrated.
This chip has excellent 2D image quality
and is capable of high quality DVD playback with
very low power consumption.
(slightly blurry
but click it for a close-up)
ATIs goal is to
have 60% of total mobile market share within 2
years. With
chips like this and others coming down the
pipeline, its a distinct possibility.
We were also given
a chance to walk through this locations
manufacturing plant.
The process of making boards is very
interesting.
We were allowed to take a few snapshots
along the way
Notice the reels
of components and RAM.
Each roll corresponds with a specific
location (or locations) on a board and components
are spun-off and populated on a board as
needed. This method of handling components
is called "tape and reel" and the parts
are housed in a sort of blister pack with a tape
over it that is peeled off as components are fed
into the robot "chip-shooter".
This whole process is called "pick and
place" in the electronics manufacturing
business. It
was very cool to see in action.
I even got a chance
to "rub elbows" with Kwok
Yuen (KY) Ho, the head honcho (President and CEO)
over at ATI Headquarters.
(he asked me to
take over, I told him it would cramp my style)
A
hands on look at the Radeon |