by Anna Filatova
08/16/2002 | 05:29 PM
This Japanese source, posted a details report about an ATI press-conference held in Japan, where the local director of the company, Mr. Kwok Yuen Ho made a number of pretty curious announcements about the upcoming ATI plans.
First of all, they reported that ATI hasn’t yet given up the idea about developing dual-chip graphics cards. RADEON 9700 chips proved capable of working in pairs on a single PCB, which should theoretically allow creating 3D accelerators with tremendous performance. At the same time an ATI representative said that at present they had no plans concerning the launching of these monstrous graphics cards and the only argument that could push them to consider this possibility could be the market. If the market wants high-performance solutions like that supporting 4-monito configurations, then why not give it a try.<%BANNER[article]%>
Speaking about more down-to-earth things we should also touch upon RADEON 9500. It turns out that the light version of ATI RADEON 9700 will be not just a graphics card with lower working frequencies. ATI is going to reduce its performance tangibly by removing half of the rendering pipelines (so that there are 4 of them used) and reducing the memory bus width by 50% (down to 128bit).
Despite the fact that NVIDIA will manufacture its NV30 chips with 0.13micron technology, ATI is not going to introduce it in the near future. RADEON 9700 will be made with 0.15micron technology until the very end, as to Kwok Yuen Ho. At the same time, 0.13micron technology will be used for the next solution also known as R350. R350 was reported to comply with DirectX 9.1 specifications and is to come out within Q1 2003. By the way, it is pretty interesting that ATI considers the possibility of moving a part of its chips production to UMC’s fabs. And after the situation with NVIDIA reducing their orders by TSMC, this may mean another wave of problems for TSMC.
As for the mobile chips market, they promised to officially announce RADEON 9000 Mobility within two months.