We came across some very interesting info on the web about the Trident Company and their new baby, XP4 graphics chip, which entered the desktop market now. First of all, the official chipset specifications got finally confirmed:

• 0.13micron GPU working at 250-300MHz;
• 30 million transistors;
• 4 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs each;
• 2 programmable vertex shader pipelines;
• 64/128bit DDR SDRAM interface;
• Supports up to 256MB graphics memory working at 250-350MHz (500-700MHz DDR);
• Rasterizing based on tile architecture;
• AGP 4x;
• DirectX 8.1 compatible pixel and vertex shaders.

If you take a closer look at the specs above, you will definitely have a lot of questions, and the main one will be: why Trident XP4 features so few transistors. As for the features, this chip is very similar to GeForce4, however, the NVIDIA solution is twice as large and includes about 63 million transistors. Does it mean that Trident engineers worked out some absolutely new approach to the graphics chip design?

Nope. Trident XP4 appears to have only one fully-fledged rendering pipeline: DirectX 8. The other pipelines are not fully functional, and share some of the logics with the first pipeline and with one another. On the one hand this allowed Trident to make the chip much smaller in size and to make it dissipate very little heat: about 3-4W only. But on the other hand, we cannot state that the performance of the newcomer will be as high as that of the other chips with 4 rendering pipelines.

In fact, we will hardly be able to learn anything else about the performance of the new Trident XP4 before the working samples of the first graphics cards based on it come out. Although, the manufacturer claims that different modifications of Trident XP4 will perform as follows (these are the results obtained in 3DMark2001 in 1024x768x32 in a system with Intel Pentium 4 2GHz CPU):

• XP4 T3 (300MHz core, 667MHz 128MB 128bit DDR SDRAM) – over 9000 points;
• XP4 T2 (250MHz core, 500MHz 64MB 128bit DDR SDRAM) – over 7000 points;
• XP4 T1 (200MHz core, 400MHz 64MB 64bit DDR SDRAM) – over 5000 points.

In other words, Trident claims that the fastest XP4 T3 model should work almost as fast as RADEON 8500 and GeForce4 Ti4200. To tell the truth, I really doubt it.

There also appeared some info about Trident’s further plans. The company didn’t want to stop after the launching of the new XP4 and is planning to continue working on this family later on. In H1 2003 they are going to release XP8 chip supporting AGP 8x and complying with the DirectX 9 specs. This chip will be manufactured with 0.1micron technology and will be able to work at up to 350MHz. At the same time, the memory used will work at up to 1GHz frequency. Then, in the end of 2003, Trident is going to launch a more revolutionary solution aka XP10. This chip will be developed for 3GIO bus but will also work well in AGP 8x systems. The chip will support DirectX 10 and its working frequencies will rise up to 600MHz. The memory in this case will work at 1.2GHz. Xp10 will also be manufactured with 0.1micron technology.

Well, Trident’s plans are really tremendous. Now all they have to do is to put them into life. And this is not always an easy task to fulfill, which we see by some other companies sometimes. Especially, since there hasn’t been even a single sample of a Trident XP4 based graphics card yet.