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http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030304S0007
ATI aims for cellphone, set-top and console
By Rick Merritt
EE Times
March 4, 2003 (9:32 a.m. EST)
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — As dessert arrives, David Orton steps outside the hotel banquet room to make a quick cellphone call. The president of ATI Technologies Inc. wants to check whether he can make an announcement at the intimate press dinner he is hosting on the eve of the Game Developers Conference this week.
It might be the company's first design win in a cellphone, or a deal to partner on a next-generation Xbox or GameCube console. But this is not the night for whatever big news Orton is anticipating.
Undeterred, Orton returns to the table to talk about his company's progress as it seeks to "capture the flag" in graphics in and beyond the PC. "This company will become a PC and consumer company making discrete and integrated graphics chips, and in 2004 ATI will become a visual computing company beyond the PC. We've got to get into a faster growing part of the market," he vowed.
Specifically, ATI aims to earning as much as 10 percent of its more than $1 billion in revenues from consoles, cellphones and set-top boxes by the end of its fiscal year in August. That's up from about 5 percent of non-PC business today.
To that end, Orton said ATI (Markham, Ontario) already has its first design wins for graphics in high-end cellphones based on the company's Imageon 100, a 2D graphics and MPEG-4 decode chip launched last year. Those phones should ship in the next six months. The chip is already shipping in PDAs from Sharp and Toshiba.
Orton said videoconferencing will be big for business phones, driving the need for both MPEG4 encode and decode. Consumer phones ultimately will need some level of 3D support, he added.
As for consoles, he hopes to leverage ATI's separate east and west coast graphics design teams to snag deals to provide chips both to Microsoft's as well as Nintendo's next-generation consoles. (ATI already provides graphics technology in Nintendo's current GameCube, a deal Orton won as chief executive of ArtX, which ATI purchased nearly three years ago.)
"Anyone who wants to hit 2005 [with a new console] better make some decisions quickly. We think they need to decide soon or wait until 2006 to ship," Orton said.
The nex-generation Sony Playstation is "already sewn up" with partners IBM and Toshiba building a so-called Cell chip apparently based on a massively parallel array of general-purpose processors. "Our belief is Sony won't go with pixel shading, but will make every pixel a polygon and throw polygons at the problem. It's a different philosophy," Orton said.
But that's not optimal for graphics processing that requires a variety of specialized polygon and rendering engines, he said. And programmers will need a new environment that shields them from such massive parallel processing, he added.
Meanwhile, ATI and its archrival Nvidia Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) is expected to go head-to-head this week rolling out new versions of their desktop PC graphics chips, a market where ATI hopes to jump from about a 26 percent to a 40 percent share, wresting the number one spot away from Nvidia.
At the same time, both companies are coming to grips with a PC market shifting toward low-end integrated chip sets with graphics. Both ATI and Nvidia launched such products last year, though ATI has an edge as the only company of the two with a license to build chip sets for Intel's Pentium processors.
ATI aims for cellphone, set-top and console
By Rick Merritt
EE Times
March 4, 2003 (9:32 a.m. EST)
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — As dessert arrives, David Orton steps outside the hotel banquet room to make a quick cellphone call. The president of ATI Technologies Inc. wants to check whether he can make an announcement at the intimate press dinner he is hosting on the eve of the Game Developers Conference this week.
It might be the company's first design win in a cellphone, or a deal to partner on a next-generation Xbox or GameCube console. But this is not the night for whatever big news Orton is anticipating.
Undeterred, Orton returns to the table to talk about his company's progress as it seeks to "capture the flag" in graphics in and beyond the PC. "This company will become a PC and consumer company making discrete and integrated graphics chips, and in 2004 ATI will become a visual computing company beyond the PC. We've got to get into a faster growing part of the market," he vowed.
Specifically, ATI aims to earning as much as 10 percent of its more than $1 billion in revenues from consoles, cellphones and set-top boxes by the end of its fiscal year in August. That's up from about 5 percent of non-PC business today.
To that end, Orton said ATI (Markham, Ontario) already has its first design wins for graphics in high-end cellphones based on the company's Imageon 100, a 2D graphics and MPEG-4 decode chip launched last year. Those phones should ship in the next six months. The chip is already shipping in PDAs from Sharp and Toshiba.
Orton said videoconferencing will be big for business phones, driving the need for both MPEG4 encode and decode. Consumer phones ultimately will need some level of 3D support, he added.
As for consoles, he hopes to leverage ATI's separate east and west coast graphics design teams to snag deals to provide chips both to Microsoft's as well as Nintendo's next-generation consoles. (ATI already provides graphics technology in Nintendo's current GameCube, a deal Orton won as chief executive of ArtX, which ATI purchased nearly three years ago.)
"Anyone who wants to hit 2005 [with a new console] better make some decisions quickly. We think they need to decide soon or wait until 2006 to ship," Orton said.
The nex-generation Sony Playstation is "already sewn up" with partners IBM and Toshiba building a so-called Cell chip apparently based on a massively parallel array of general-purpose processors. "Our belief is Sony won't go with pixel shading, but will make every pixel a polygon and throw polygons at the problem. It's a different philosophy," Orton said.
But that's not optimal for graphics processing that requires a variety of specialized polygon and rendering engines, he said. And programmers will need a new environment that shields them from such massive parallel processing, he added.
Meanwhile, ATI and its archrival Nvidia Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) is expected to go head-to-head this week rolling out new versions of their desktop PC graphics chips, a market where ATI hopes to jump from about a 26 percent to a 40 percent share, wresting the number one spot away from Nvidia.
At the same time, both companies are coming to grips with a PC market shifting toward low-end integrated chip sets with graphics. Both ATI and Nvidia launched such products last year, though ATI has an edge as the only company of the two with a license to build chip sets for Intel's Pentium processors.
