ATI engineering must be under alot of strain. MS funding?

[cybamerc]

Qroach:

> Art X was also workign on it much longer



ArtX/ATI spent about 2 years on Flipper while Nvidia spent 18 months reworking its PC technology.

> and they only provided graphics

And north and south bridge.

 

[Sazar]

I don't see how the strain is THAT huge, Nvidia did the same thing a couple of years ago with XBox 1...

You can be confident that this is what caused the "NV30 debacle". Nothing went as expected with the NV30, and they didn't have the workforce or budget to correct mistakes fast enough.
So what we got in the end is an architecture with tremendous potential speed, but which is so badly implemented that it's impossible to run it at anywhere near the peak GFLops numbers. Drivers can help, but they'll never be able to really 'fix' this. Just minimize it.


Uttar

the architecture itself is buggered so the tremendous potential speed is not going to be achievable by drivers alone but hardware design changes to compensate for some seemingly basic errors in judgement... IMO... and as you have pointed out in your own posts around the web...

 

[Megadrive1988]

afaik ati never acquired real3d
they did acqiure: tseng labs, artx, chromatic research, nextwave

Dominikbehr, i don't think ATi acquired the entire Real3D company
like they did ArtX, but I am pretty certain ATi got some Real3D
patents/IP and some of their engineers.

Anyone have a definitive answer on this? I thought ATi got parts of
Real3D from Intel and/or 3DLabs.

 

[WaltC]

Yes i think the problem is, after reading most of the coments since yesterday, that in a lot of people mind ATI is still a relative small company and just had luck with R300 core.

Well, a "lot of people's minds" can now be said to have achieved enlightenment... ATi was shipping graphics cores and cards in OEM PCs before nVidia shipped its first 3d card. Ditto: 3dfx. Started 1985, I believe, and shipped its first graphics cards in 1987.

http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/milestones/1987.html

 

[Sazar]

afaik ati never acquired real3d
they did acqiure: tseng labs, artx, chromatic research, nextwave

Dominikbehr, i don't think ATi acquired the entire Real3D company
like they did ArtX, but I am pretty certain ATi got some Real3D
patents/IP and some of their engineers.

Anyone have a definitive answer on this? I thought ATi got parts of
Real3D from Intel and/or 3DLabs.

IIRC they got engineers... not sure if they got the whole company.. just the engineers...

TBH I could well be wrong

 

[Megadrive1988]

IIRC they got engineers... not sure if they got the whole company.. just the engineers...

hey, that's better than not having the engineers! even if ATi just got a large share of R3D engineers, that would be marvleous. the engineers are very obviously the most valueble asset ^__^

 

[DemoCoder]

You can be confident that this is what caused the "NV30 debacle". Nothing went as expected with the NV30, and they didn't have the workforce or budget to correct mistakes fast enough.

Poppycock. I work for a large Consumer electronic company. Every time I have seen a project run into a wall. Management solves it by throwing more people at it. And that almost NEVER helps. You can just take 20 engineers and say go help this team fix their fab issues. What you need is the right engineers to help not just mass numbers something our management still does not seem to understand. Most of the NV30 issues came from too much PR and not enough common sense. It was not a lack of resources....

Yep, mythical man month. Too many cooks in the kitchen. etc etc

Architecture and tech development is more like art than like industrial production. Don't put ten guys on a problem, put the 1 or 2 who know exactly what they are doing in that area.

Did Leonardo or Michaelangelo need a team to help them?

 

[flf]

Did Leonardo or Michaelangelo need a team to help them?

Yes... someone had to build the scaffoldings that they sat on while working on their art.

 

[RaolinDarksbane]

I have a conspiracy theory about MS, Nvidia, Nintendo, and ATI. What if MS is giving Nvidia a chance to make a better chipset than ATI(then they will switch).. ATI will know that Nvidia has a chance so they would focus a lot of attention into making a better chip than Nvidia, which is presumably take some resource away from Nintendo's chip. In the end, MS will win either(choosing ATI or Nvidia) way by getting a superior chipset than their competitor.

If you think about it, if MS had sticked with Nvidia, they wouldn't know how powerful Nintendo chip would be(ATI could possibly developed a superior chip than Nvidia). The XBOX2 technological advantage wouldn't have been so sure. By doing this, they are more likely to have a more superior chip than Nintendo.

 

[Geo]

Yeah, but I bet if we went back and looked there would be plenty of statements from NV types about xbox 1 not messing them up at all. Nv2a would be so close to their next product, etc. That's no guarantee that ATI will have the same problem --but it is also no guarantee that just because they are confident right now that it won't that in the end that will turn out to have been the case. Seems to me that xbox 1 had been out for about a year before (JC, wasn't it?) the real truth about the impact on their schedules was acknowledged.

 

[Qroach]

Cybermerc,

ArtX/ATI spent about 2 years on Flipper while Nvidia spent 18 months reworking its PC technology.

Yet again your attitude does nothing but accentuate how wrong you are.

You can roll your eyes all you want, but you're FLAT wrong. Art- X was working with nintendo before any public XBOX GPU annoucement was made. Just as a quick example of this, here's an article from May of 1999 talking about Nintendo, IBM and ART-X. This wasn't even the date nintendo signed up with art-X and it's STILL 14 months before Nvidia got invovled with Xbox.

back at you.

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19990512S0025

Nvidia won the xbox contract on 10 March, 2000 for a release in november 2001. At that time the Xbox hardware didn't even exsist.

And north and south bridge.

OK, fine. Nvidia provided the north and south bridge, memory controller, UMA mother board design, GPU, and MCP Audio chip. As I said, Nvidia provided more to the design of xbox then ATI/artX did to the overall design of gamecube "in less time". Hence, more engineers were required.

 

[Toasty]

IIRC they got engineers... not sure if they got the whole company.. just the engineers...

hey, that's better than not having the engineers! even if ATi just got a large share of R3D engineers, that would be marvleous. the engineers are very obviously the most valueble asset ^__^

Ohh goodness did ATI get the majority of Real3D engineers. Supporting evidence: http://www.gameai.com/r3dgames.html .

ATI's Orlando offices is basically composed of the company formerly known as Real3D. When you combine the engineering assets of ATI's Marlborough design house, the ArtX design house, a good chunk of Real3D's team, not to mention the former FireGL team, and less we forget ATI has snatched up a lot of former staff from Matrox after they shut down their Toronto offices, I don't don't see any problem with the number of projects ATI is undertaking 8)

 

[Megadrive1988]

Yet again your attitude does nothing but accentuate how wrong you are.

You can roll your eyes all you want, but you're FLAT wrong. Art- X was working with nintendo before any public XBOX GPU annoucement was made. Just as a quick example of this, here's an article from May of 1999 talking about Nintendo, IBM and ART-X. This wasn't even the date nintendo signed up with art-X and it's STILL 14 months before Nvidia got invovled with Xbox.

true.

ArtX was formed in 1997. they were already talking to Nintendo before they broke away from SGI. Nintendo encouraged it, from what Ive read.

The ArtX-Nintendo partnership was mentioned in the gaming press in late 1997 or early 1998. that was before the project was publicly annouced as Dolphin, in the days when Nintendo's follow-up to N64 was known as N2000.

just plug 'N2000 and ArtX' or 'Nintendo and ArtX' into Google or Google groups and you will find stuff from Next Generation, IGN and other sources.

 

[Megadrive1988]

Ohh goodness did ATI get the majority of Real3D engineers. Supporting evidence: http://www.gameai.com/r3dgames.html .

ATI's Orlando offices is basically composed of the company formerly known as Real3D. When you combine the engineering assets of ATI's Marlborough design house, the ArtX design house, a good chunk of Real3D's team, not to mention the former FireGL team, and less we forget ATI has snatched up a lot of former staff from Matrox after they shut down their Toronto offices, I don't don't see any problem with the number of projects ATI is undertaking

Holy , that is the most eye-opening post I have seen all day... more interesting (to me at least) than even the news of ATI winning the bid for Xbox2.

you know what, when I read that ATi had an office in FLORIDA, something clicked in my head. I remember that Lockheed Real3D's offices were in Florida. whoa. that's a revalation, and to be honest, ive been hunting around the web for a while trying to link ATi to Real3D, because I had heard awhile back that ATi got some Real3D engineers but couldnt find anything to support that. guess i missed that info before in my search.

 

[3dcgi]

Ohh goodness did ATI get the majority of Real3D engineers. Supporting evidence: http://www.gameai.com/r3dgames.html .

ATI's Orlando offices is basically composed of the company formerly known as Real3D. When you combine the engineering assets of ATI's Marlborough design house, the ArtX design house, a good chunk of Real3D's team, not to mention the former FireGL team, and less we forget ATI has snatched up a lot of former staff from Matrox after they shut down their Toronto offices, I don't don't see any problem with the number of projects ATI is undertaking 8)

Matrox shut down two offices. The second office was in Florida.

 

[kemosabe]

Just some blurbs from the conference presentation above:

ATI stated:

The company has entered into an agreement with Microsoft to participate in future products and services for the X-Box and future X-Box derivatives."

It's a long-term, strategic deal...it's for x-box technologies and things related to that. It's a very strategic deal for ATI.

It's a deal involving development costs and royalties in the future and a deal that involves technology related to x-box activities...it will be up to Microsoft to divulge further details if they choose to.

We have entered into a contract with Nintendo to do additional technology development for Nintendo in the future.

In our current deal with Nintendo, we have hardware and software royalties with Nintendo for the existing GameCube. NEC makes the Nintendo Chips

We should see cell phones with ATI technology in the Fall.

[WRT cell phones, the features we provide] revolve around higher fidelity performance at a lower cost, lower power usage, lower space and being able to integrate capabilities in a number of handheld and mobile environments.

We do intend going forward to have a multiple-foundry strategy as we have now. We will probably not take part of the high end graphics and send it somewhere else (like apparently our competitor).

Our general statement about integrated-- going extremely well

Resource allocation: Can't comment on what nVidia did or didn't do. In this case it's about being able to leverage technology efficiently. (As opposed to getting a new large contract and needed to hire new staff to meet workload.) We've been planning for some time for proper resource allocation to be able to execute on that deal as well as continue on the other things that we're currently pursuing. We have a very braod and deep set of engineers. We already have anticipated this contract and already hired a number of people. Certainly in some key areas we will be picking up various contractors...but we don't see the addition of any large number of resources...won't go on a hiring spree...we'll be leveraging the base that we have. We are really not concerned about the impact on our PC roadmap.

Hehe, spoken like a true shareholder who does his diligence. I posted a similar recap on the Yahoo board: http://finance.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=15969433&tid=atyt&sid=15969433&mid=71686 , which is why I wondered whether you might not join us from time to time. By the way, do you know whether Dave or anyone else at B3D has any contact with Mike Magee at the Inquirer? He made a very bizarre statement about ATI severing ties with Nintendo in this blurb: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11039

When I emailed him asking why he was reporting such nonsense, he replied:

"Well how odd. Because I originally had in place of that line "What is this going to mean to Nintendo? We dunno"

And then I had a call from someone at ATI, so I changed it..."

:?

 

[horvendile]

Did Leonardo or Michaelangelo need a team to help them?

Actually, they probably did!
I don't know details about these two, but almost all big renaissance artists had workshops approaching factories with scores of workers working for them. Many times the helpers painted the bulk of the paintings, then the master painted the really hard parts (faces, hands, feet) and put his name on the painting.

A bit of a sidetrack, I know, and not necessarily with any bearing on semiconductor design, bit IMHO interesting nevertheless!

 

[Arun]

Did Leonardo or Michaelangelo need a team to help them?

Actually, they probably did!
I don't know details about these two, but almost all big renaissance artists had workshops approaching factories with scores of workers working for them. Many times the helpers painted the bulk of the paintings, then the master painted the really hard parts (faces, hands, feet) and put his name on the painting.

A bit of a sidetrack, I know, and not necessarily with any bearing on semiconductor design, bit IMHO interesting nevertheless!

Yes, for example, Ruebens had very big teams indeed! He didn't do much himself in the end, hehe. He was a designer then - not a programmer anymore.

Jb: Actually, the NV30 issues were increased even further by Management and Marketing, that is aknolwedge. Marketing created an insane and unjustified marketing campaign and, AFAIK, they are responsible for the "overclocking", or rather "over volting" of the NV30. So they indirectly asked for Flow FX.

But the *core* problems of the NV30 were certainly facilitated by a lack of resources. It seems to me they wanted to compensate a lack of resources in the initial design phases by a LOT of money, a lot of redesigns, and similar stuff. Things which simply didn't work: if your original design is made my a bunch of monkeys, and you then use the world's smartest engineers to implement it, it still won't be too good. And if they decide to finally redesign it, it'll be too little, too late.

The bad design goals of the NV30 were *possibly, but far from certainly, influenced by management. I just don't think engineers would seriously believe they can achieve "cinematic computing" in about 2 years from when the project began. The design limitations, such as those instruction limits, were maybe influenced by Management and Marketing's goals.

But that, I doubt we'll ever know it for sure.


Uttar

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Hehe, spoken like a true shareholder who does his diligence.

Lol...

...which is why I wondered whether you might not join us from time to time.

Well, I'll lurk from time to time, but probably not participate!

By the way, do you know whether Dave or anyone else at B3D has any contact with Mike Magee at the Inquirer? He made a very bizarre statement about ATI severing ties with Nintendo in this blurb: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11039

Bizarre indeed. I guess that would be news to Dave Ralston at ATI as well. Never say never, (stranger things have happened) but it makes no sense for ATI to insist they still have the development relationship with Ninetendo...if they don't.

 

[Arun]

Bizarre indeed. I guess that would be news to Dave Ralston at ATI as well. Never say never, (stranger things have happened) but it makes no sense for ATI to insist they still have the development relationship with Ninetendo...if they don't.

But it makes no sense either for nVidia to insist they still have the development relationship with Microsoft... if they don't.

See, same logic Hehe. We'll see I guess. Although it seems obvious to me now ATI got the vast majority of the deals with MS secured.


Uttar