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August 12, 2003
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ATI Confirms R420 Made Using 0.13 micron
Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President, Marketing and General Manager, Desktop, ATI Technologies, presented his company at the Pacific Crest Technology Forum at the Sonnenlap Resort, Vail, Colorado yesterday. As it always happens, a number of quite interesting details concerning the company as well as its current and future products were said during the presentation.
The company confirmed that it experiences no cost or yield issues with its RADEON 9600-series graphics processors made by two TSMC fabs using 0.13 micron process. Mr. Bergman even reiterated ATI's concentration on improving its gross margins what presumes the lack of any problems with the cost of the products, so it looks like the company really has no issues with the 0.13 micron fabrication technology.
Thanks to excellent adoption of RADEON 9600 and 9800 families of VPUs, ATI Technologies now dominates in performance-mainstream segment of graphics cards and has terrific positions in enthusiast segment of the market. The next step for the company is to offer the RADEON 9600 or its derivative for entry-level market to compete against NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5200 family of GPUs.
Besides, Rick Bergman said that the company's FIRE GL products for workstations are also very well positioned. ATI Technologies' market share in the workstation market segment is currently 20%, whereas the share of its arch-rival NVIDIA is about 70%. The remaining part of the market is divided between providers of extremely high-end products, such as 3Dlabs, HP and Sun.
Just like NVIDIA's representatives during the most recent conference call, ATI's VP of Desktop division also did not said anything on timeframes of the code-named R400/R420 next-generation architecture product, but said that it contains hundreds of millions transistors and will be made using [now] mature 0.13 micron fabrication technology. We should note that the next high-end VPU from ATI expected this Fall and known as R380 will still be made using 0.15 micron technology.
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Microsoft Windows Longhorn in 2005
According to Poole, Longhorn will RTM (be released to manufacturing) and, presumably, given to customers in 2005. This settles a long-standing question about whether Microsoft would shoot for a late 2004 release or simply let the product slip into the next year. The 2005 RTM date is interesting for a number of reasons, as is what I'm calling Longhorn's "tiered rollout." Let me explain what I mean by this."
Full Article:
WinSupersite
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NVIDIA vs. HardOCP's Kyle Bennet
I am sorry, but I have now had enough. NVIDIA needs to fess up to their actions publicly. NVIDIA needs to apologize for their actions publicly. NVIDIA needs to spell out the corrections they are going to make publicly. NVIDIA needs to make the community aware of the optimizations they will make that affect benchmark scores in games and synthetics. NVIDIA needs to treat the community with the respect they deserve. If they do not, the enthusiast community needs to go spend their money with the competition and urge all the people that ask them for buying advice to do the same.
The bottom line is this. NVIDIA has broken a sacred trust between themselves and the community and unless they get their issues together very quickly and address them, I have a feeling that many more of you will not be buying their products. NVIDIA's current line of cards is very strong and they look to be good products, but as a consumer I would personally have a hard time giving them my money right now. The only real power we consumers have is to vote with our wallets.
ATI and NVIDIA need to pull out of the Futuremark Beta Program and recommit themselves to focusing on their customers gaming experience. But, this is all just my opinion.
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