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News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 2)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 07/09/2004 | 04:52 PM ]

PCI Express x16 Ramp: ATI Technologies Captures the Market

ATI Technologies, the world’s second largest maker of discrete graphics processors, said it had won roughly 100% of the PCI Express graphics business with OEMs. The company also said it expected to get a large market share of the so-called channel PCI Express business.

OEMs Prefer ATI Technologies, says ATI

“Currently, ATI has about 100% of the OEM PCI Express business, and we expect to get a large proportion of the channel business, much larger than we have achieved in the past, too,” said Chris Evenden, a spokesman for ATI Technologies.

ATI's RADEON X600 XT

In late June ATI said world’s leading OEMs, such as Acer, IBM, Dell, MPC Computers, eMachines, NEC, Fujitsu-Siemens, Packard Bell, Gateway and Sony, along with plethora of second-tier computer makers had chosen PCI Express graphics cards powered by ATI Technologies’ visual processing units to install into new PCs.

ATI’s arch-rival NVIDIA Corporation said that among the first-tier PC makers only Acer and MPC Computers had chosen NVIDIA’s PCI Express offerings. Additionally, a lot of second-tier system integrators unveiled plans to use PCI Express graphics cards based on NVIDIA’s graphics processing units. The company denied to indicate any numbers in regards its PCI Express products’ ramp up.

PCI Express Market: Small, but Growing

While the hype about the market of PCI Express x16 graphics cards is pretty strong now, the market share of PCI Express graphics devices is unlikely to surpass 30% - 35% mark this year, some analysts noted.

“We strongly believe in the value PCI Express brings to PCs and that is why we have been working with Intel and the PCI Express SIG for the last 18 months. Since it represents a major transition in the PC industry, it is very difficult to estimate just how long it will take. We believe the transition will happen faster at the high-end than the low-end, but we know  there will demand for both PCI-Express and AGP cards at all levels for a long time to come,” said Luciano Alibrandi, NVIDIA’s Director of Product PR – EMEA.

NVIDIA GeForce PCX 5900 from Albatron

“There is going to be a difference in take-up between the channel, such as add-in card vendors, and OEMs. OEM will be in approximately 90% cases at PCI Express by the end of the year; the channel is expected to be at around 30%-40% PCI Express by the end of 2004. So overall, 40% - 50% of new PCs will be with PCI Express by the 31^st of December, 2004,” said Chris Evenden, ATI’s Director of PR.

We decided to ask makers of actual components about the transition and selected ABIT, as this is a company that is praised by computer enthusiasts and that was also recently selected by ATI and Intel to supply graphics cards to their most-important customers among system integrators.

"As the industry is in a major transition period, many mainboard and graphics cards manufacturers are challenged by the new technologies. It will take time and effort to educate the channel and end-users to see true values that the new technologies have to offer. Price and availability are other key-factors that will influence the market. I think we all remember the transition from Parallel ATA to Serial ATA. Serial ATA is pretty much a standard today but it took a long time to get to this point,” said Janet Webskowski, a spokesperson for ABIT

 

Not very optimistic, is it?

 

“At ABIT, we are pretty confident about the prospects of PCI Express. We are expecting about 80% of our graphics cards production to be PCI Express cards by early 2005. We have our own unique board and cooling design for current PCI Express cards. Soon users will be able to see mGuru chip on ABIT graphics cards for better overclocking and performance,” Webskowski continued.

ABIT's RADEON X600 XT

“As for mainboards, we’re shipping i925/i915-series chipsets based AA8/AG8 mainboards at full speed. We are going to launch a new Fatal1ty mainboard line for gamers and hard core overclockers in August. It’s a very exciting project as we’re working with the world’s top gamers to develop the boards and include all the newest technologies available on the market. Right now the market is still small and it’s growing slowly, but we might see a huge jump by the end of the third or into the fourth quarters when NVIDIA launches its chipset with PCI Express support,” ABIT’s spokesperson explained.

 

Being pretty concentrated on gamers, ABIT is forecasting 80% of graphics cards to be produced for PCI Express platforms by early 2005. In case the prediction is not overoptimistic, this is certainly a good news for developers of graphics processors…

Leading GPU Makers Ready with PCI Express

PCI Express is a next-generation internal interconnection for personal computers that will exist in certain speed incarnations, e.g., x1, x4, x16. The PCI Express x16 lane is intended primarily for graphics cards, works at about 2.50GHz and is able to pump up to 8GB of data in each direction. Due to totally different transfer protocol from the AGP 8x bus, the PCI Express also has some other advantages over AGP, such as isolated read and write channels, ability to prioritize the data streams and a number of others.

While both NVIDIA and ATI are ready to offer their latest graphics processors to clients who plan to acquire personal computers with PCI Express x16 bus (PEG x16), approaches the companies used to add PCI Express interface into their chips seem to be different. ATI Technologies uses built-in PCI Express x16 controller and is able to offer fully-featured so-called “native PCI Express” solutions. NVIDIA uses a special chip that bridges its AGP graphics processors with PCI Express x16 platforms. NVIDIA claims that PEG x16 bandwidth or bi-directional transfer ability are not sacrificed as a consequence of its “bridge approach”, though, certain PCI Express functionality may not be enabled on NVIDIA’s graphics cards with the HSI bridge, some analysts said.

ATI Technologies currently offers RADEON X300-, RADEON X600- and RADEON X800-series of graphics processors with PCI Express x16 interface targeting entry-level, mainstream and high-end markets. NVIDIA targets the same market segments with its GeForce PCX 5300, GeForce PCX 5750, GeForce PCX 5900, GeForce 6800 GT as well as GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards supporting PCI Express x16 interconnection.

Smaller graphics chip designers, such as S3 Graphics, 3Dlabs and XGI Technology, are likely to jump on the PCI Express x16 bandwagon a bit later this Summer.