Process migrations, design optimizations squeeze out additional speed
By Brian Dipert -- EDN, January 8, 2004
ATI Technologies believes that the company’s Radeon 9600 and 9800 graphics architectures, which it first unveiled nearly a year and a half ago as the closely related 9500 and 9700, still have plenty of life left in them. Latest generation announcements seem to bear out ATI’s claims. The company still hasn’t moved its flagship 9800 to 0.13-micron process technology, but a continued focus on design and layout optimization has resulted in the high-end Radeon 9800 XT with a 412-MHz core and 365-MHz double-data-rate memory-clock speeds—that is, 730 Mbps per pin across a 256-bit bus (see “Product profusion portends a return to past form,” EDN , May 29, 2003, pg 22). ATI is shipping $499, 256-Mbyte boards based on Radeon 9800 XT.
For the first time, ATI Technologies supports “quality-assured,” guaranteed overclocking in its drivers, partially thanks to a temperature-controlled variable-speed fan and companion copper heat sink on the Radeon 9800 XT board. ATI has migrated its mainstream Radeon 9600 to a low-K dielectric variant of its 0.13-micron process, a move that has also delivered significant performance gains. The Radeon 9600 XT runs at a greater-than-500-MHz core speed, and its 128-bit memory bus interfaces to greater-than-300- MHz, greater-than-600-Mbps-per-pin DDR SDRAM. Exact speeds were unavailable at press time. The company is selling $199, 128-Mbyte boards based on the Radeon 9600 XT. Both chips fully support Microsoft’s DirectX 9 graphics API.
ATI Technologies, 1-905-882-2600, www.ati.com.
