Graphics power plants expand their integration grasp

ATI Technologies was perfectly content to allow its primary competitor to debug their shared foundry's latest process. With that potential setback safely behind it, though, the company is not willing to hand over its hard-won, eight-month-long hold on the performance crown to Nvidia (see "Graphics flurry may leave you blurry," EDN, March 20, 2003, pg 16). ATI's latest generation Radeon 9800 Pro desktop- graphics accelerator moves the 01.5-micron 9700 predecessor to a 0.13-micron process with consequent performance boosts to 380 and 340 MHz for the core- and memory-clock frequencies, respectively, as well as tweaks to the pixel-shader architecture, Z-buffer, and antialiasing engine.

Boards based on the Radeon 9800 Pro and containing 128-Mbyte frame buffers cost $399; the company also plans to offer 256-Mbyte boards. ATI has moved the four-pipeline Radeon 9500 architecture's process to come up with the Radeon 9600 (Picture), which runs at 400-MHz core-clock and 300-MHz memory-clock rates and will cost $199 in a 128-Mbyte configuration. The Radeon 9200, like Nvidia's GeForce FX 5200, employs the previous generation, 0.15-micron process and is an upgrade of Radeon 8500 and 9000 precursors; 128-Mbyte boards will cost $149 (see "Graphics rivals ready for the holidays," EDN, Aug 22, 2002, pg 18).

An ever-increasing number of industry analysts forecast that a significant percentage of PC shipments in coming years will be in the mobile, not desktop, arena, now that notebook PCs are sufficiently powerful to handle common tasks and as wireless networks become faster and more pervasive. Long concurring with this prediction, ATI puts apt attention on the notebook-graphics market, first with a performance-boosted variant of the Radeon 340M north-bridge chip with an embedded graphics core. The newly christened Radeon 7000M comprehends latest generation mobile Pentium 4 processors' 533-MHz front-side bus, along with 333-MHz DDR SDRAM.

The more impressive mobile-graphics achievement, however, is ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600, the latest outcome of the company's lengthy focus on low-power innovation. Mobility Radeon 9600, a significant upgrade of its Mobility Radeon 9000 forerunner, is architecturally most similar to the Radeon 9500 desktop-graphics chip but, like the Radeon 9600 and 9800, uses a 0.13-micron process. ATI includes both DVI and LVDS transmitters on Mobility Radeon 9600, along with a TV encoder and dual RAMDACs, one of which can directly output either RGB or component-video signals.

ATI Technologies has worked closely with Elpida (www.elpida.com) to develop a low-power variant of DDR SDRAM it calls GDDR2-M; see the DRAM cover story in EDN's upcoming April 23 issue for more information. The company plans both discrete and multidie 32-, 64-, and 128-Mbyte variants of Mobility Radeon 9600. It will ship Pro parts targeting $2500 notebooks early in the third quarter. They will run at 300-MHz core and 350-MHz memory speeds. Mainstream Mobility Radeon 9600 chips, now available and targeting $2000 notebook PCs, employ 250-MHz-core and 300-MHz-memory clocks.

ATI Technologies, 1-905-882-2620, www.ati.com.