ATI Acquires Additional Chip Design Solution

[no-X]

I thought all the ex-3dfx people were at nVidia?

Not all. Scott Sellers reputedly left 3D industry, some (less than five) are working for ATi and one is working for Quantum3D.


So Xenos is work of ex-Real3D? Not ex-ArtX? And whose work is R520? Former team from ATi or ArtX?

guess:
R8500 - ATi
R9700 - ArtX
R9800 - ?
RX800 - ATi
R500 - Real3D + ?
R520 - ?

 

[sireric]

There is a big difference between purchasing a company, and partnering with an EDA company! Amusing that there's one thread for both!

We're always on the lookout for better EDA solutions, and we do partner with a lot of different companies. It's one of our driving forces and it's also something that's required for cutting edge chip design. At least for fab-less company.

 

[Geo]

There is a big difference between purchasing a company, and partnering with an EDA company! Amusing that there's one thread for both!

We're always on the lookout for better EDA solutions, and we do partner with a lot of different companies. It's one of our driving forces and it's also something that's required for cutting edge chip design. At least for fab-less company.

Hope we see more of you after, oh, say July 26 or so! I'm sure we'd all like to hear some more nitty-gritty on ATI SM3!

 

[mangrove]

Megadrive1988: do you have any info about Number9 acquisition?

no actually I don't - I'm not even 100% certain of it. I read on Rage3D forums that ATI had bought Number9 and assumed it was fact.

It is also Forgotton that what started the whole recovery of ATi was the Aquasition of Number 9. Who made some killer graphics boards in the early days.

Actually I think the Number 9 engineers went to different companies -- some of them went to a S3 already crumbling, some went to ATI. S3 was the main chip supplier for #9 -- they only made four chipsets themselves, Imagine 128, Imagine 128 Series II, Revolution 3D (Ticket To Ride chip), and Revolution IV (Ticket To Ride IV -- I still own that card). If I am not mistaken, the two first Imagine products had rudimental 3D acceleration but lacked texturing (The Revolution boards were Imagine Series III and IV). They also lacked VGA modes, being GUI accelerators exclusively, so they had a dedicated Cirrus Logic chip capable of doing VESA modes... so some drivers use that chipset only, leading to abysmal performance. Revolution 3D added a full VGA/VESA core, and was Direct3D compatible. The Revolution IV had an integrated RAMDAC, was faster and had some sort of a dual 64-bit memory bus. Performance was, um, Matrox G200-class. The Revolution IV was also the first board to hardware accelerate Microsofts GDI2K spec.

In all fairness, even though they had some cool products and some absolutely bizarre trademark moves (strange imprintings on the PCB, Beatles quotes in the bios) #9 really never produced a good 3D core. Frankly, the Revolution IV sucked, and the drivers were buggy and crash-prone. The highest performing Number Nine part was the SR-9, basically a S3 Savage4 reference design. The 2D quality coming from their own chipset designs were top notch though, I have never seen a better analog output.

They were going to use a PixelFusion chip, consisting of lots and lots of small SIMD processing elements IIRC, and build a workstation class card from that, but the money ran out in 2000 and Number Nine folded. PixelFusion tried to market their chip as a switch core instead but I don't know what happened next.

That Number Nine engineers should have made an impact inside ATI wrt 3D architecture is something I very seriously doubt considering the products they released.

 

[PC-Engine]

IIRC Pixelfusion became Clearspeed.