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News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

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

ATI Technologies, Alienware React on SLI

ATI Technologies, who once failed with MAXX dual-graphics chip approach, was more than quiet with its comments on NVIDIA’s SLI: no messages sent to officials on the matter were answered; still, some representatives for ATI and Alienware, who recently disclosed plans to offer desktops with two graphics cards, commented on NVIDIA’s tech for media.

“Should NVIDIA’s SLI technology ultimately prove faster than Alienware’s Video Array, we will offer it to our customers as soon as it becomes commercially available,” stated Frank Azor, senior vice-president and general manager of Alienware’s Worldwide Product Group. 

“Either way, we will continue to develop and optimize Video Array for all non-NVIDIA graphics solutions, such as those from ATI, 3D Labs, Matrox, and any other manufacturers.  Our sole interest is in offering technology that provides the very best computing experience possible to Alienware customers,” Mr. Azor added.

Two NVIDIA GPU-based graphics cards work in pair

“ATI could, of course. release its own implementation of SLI, or multi-chip graphics cards, but ATI has no intentions to do this in the near future. The RADEON X800 VPUs support the same scalability as the RADEON 9700 and similar graphics processors, up to 256 VPUs can work in parallel, and graphics cards like SGI’s Quad-RADEON 9800 XT can be made with the RADEON X800 chips. Moreover, technologies that would require more than two PCI Express slots for graphics cards could be made, which is not a problem, as there are chipsets with more than 24 PCI Express lanes coming out soon,” Nils Horstbrink, ATI’s desktop product manager told Golem.de web-site (translation is published by XtremeSystems.org).

“The pairing of ATI’s innovative graphics technology and Alienware’s Video Array has some truly awesome implications for 3D-intensive applications like gaming, animation, and real-time simulation. Alienware’s solution is flexible and powerful, allowing customers to push the performance envelope” said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President, Marketing, General Manager, Desktop, ATI Technologies.

Well, ATI indicates that it could develop a solution that would allow two consumer graphics cards to work in parallel, but decided not to do this for some reason. The reason for this statement might be very high price of such solution, inability to deliver such product or just unwillingness to disclose its plans…