ATI TECHNOLOGIES

'ATI Technologies U.L.C.' ATI is a major Canadian designer and supplier of graphics processing units, motherboard chipsets, and video display cards. ATI is a canonical fabless semiconductor company, conducts research and development in-house, but subcontracts manufacturing and assembly to third-parties. Originally formed in 1985, in October 2006 they were purchased by AMD.
In recent years, they have been involved in a constant battle for market share of the "high end" graphics cards market with NVIDIA. As of 2004, ATI's flagship product line is the Radeon series of graphics cards which directly compete with NVIDIA's GeForce. The two companies' dominance of the market has forced other vendors into niche roles.

Corporate overview

ATI was founded under the name 'Array Technologies Incorporated' in 1985 by three Chinese immigrants, China-born Kwok Yuen Ho ^[1] and Hong Kong-born Benny Lau and Lee Lau. Array Technologies primarily worked in the OEM field, producing integrated video display cards for large PC manufacturers like IBM. By 1987 it had evolved into an independent graphics card retailer, marketing the EGA Wonder and VGA Wonder video display cards under its own ATI moniker.

ATI's Silicon Valley office.

In 1997 ATI acquired Tseng Labs's graphics assets, which included 40 engineers. In 2000, ATI acquired ArtX, the company that engineered the "''Flipper''" graphics chip used in the Nintendo GameCube games console. They have also created a modified version of the chip (codenamed "''Hollywood''") for the successor of the GameCube, named Wii. ATI was contracted by Microsoft to create the graphics core (codenamed "''Xenos''") for Microsoft Xbox 360. Later in 2005, ATI acquired Terayon's Cable Modem Silicon Intellectual Property cementing their lead in the consumer digital television market ^[2]. K. Y. Ho remained as Chairman of the Board until he retired on November 22, 2005. Dave Orton replaced him as the President and CEO of the organization.
On July 24, 2006, AMD and ATI announced a plan to merge together in a deal valued at US$5.4 billion. The merger closed October 25, 2006.^[3] The acquisition consideration included over $2 billion financed from a loan, as well as 56 million shares of AMD stock.^[4] ATI retained its name, logos, and trademarks. The former CEO of ATI Dave Orton was appointed be the Executive Vice President (VP) of Visual and Media Businesses ^[5].
Ten months after completion of acquisition, in July 2007, AMD announced the resignation of Dave Orton, with "mixed feelings." On the other hand, ATI, renamed as the Division of Visual and Media Businesses, being a subsidiary of AMD after the purchase, was obviously renamed as Graphics Products Group ^[6], and the position of the leader of Graphics Products Group will be filled by Rick Bergman, as Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Graphics Products Group, and Adrian Hartog, Senior Vice President, who continues to lead the Consumer Electronics Group. Both directly report to Dirk Meyer, CEO of AMD.

Market History

ATI initially shipped basic 2D graphics chips to companies such as Commodore. The ''EGA Wonder'' and ''VGA Wonder'' families were released to the PC market in 1987. Each offered enhanced feature sets surpassing IBM's own (EGA and VGA) display adapters.
During the early 1990s, ATI continued to develop various 2D GUI accelerator cards that primarily targeted the Microsoft platforms. May of 1991 saw the release of the ''Mach8'' product, ATI's first "Windows accelerator" product. Windows accelerators offloaded display-processing tasks which had been performed by the CPU. (In fact, the ''Mach8'' was a feature-enhanced IBM 8514/A-compatible board.) 1992 saw the release of the ''Mach32'' chipset, offering improved memory bandwidth and GUI acceleration performance. In 1994, the ''Mach 64'' accelerator, powering the ''Graphics Xpression'' and ''Graphics Pro Turbo'', was ATI's first recognizably modern media chipset. It offered hardware support for YUV-to-RGB color space conversion in addition to hardware zoom, early pieces of hardware-based video acceleration.
As consumer-oriented 3D acceleration became feasible in the middle of the 1990s, ATI developed a combination 2D & 3D accelerator. Known as the ''3D Rage'', this initial chip was based heavily upon the ''Mach 64'', but with limited 3D acceleration added. The ''Rage'' line would span the rest of the 1990s, powering almost the entire range of ATI graphics products. The ''Rage Pro'' was one of the first viable 2D/3D competitors for the 3D-only ''3dfx Voodoo'' chipset. ATI 3D acceleration in the ''Rage'' line advanced from the basic functionality within the initial ''3D Rage'' to a much more advanced DirectX 6.0 accelerator in the 1999 ''Rage 128''.
ATI broke new ground in integration in 1996 with their ''All-in-Wonder'' product line. These featured 3D acceleration powered by ATI's second generation ''3D Rage II'', 64-bit 2D performance, TV-quality video acceleration, video capture, TV tuner functionality, flicker-free TV-out and stereo TV audio.
Also during the time of the ''Rage'' products, ATI made a successful entrance into the mobile computing sector. With products such as the ''Rage Mobility'', ATI was part of the establishment of 3D acceleration on notebook PCs. These products had to meet requirements much different than desktop products, such as minimized power usage, TDMS output capabilities for laptop screens, and maximized integration due to the compact nature of mobile and embedded designs.
In 2000, the ''Radeon'' line of graphics products was unveiled. A ''Radeon'' visual processing unit (VPU), as ATI called it, was a processor with DirectX 7 3D acceleration, video acceleration, and the ubiquitous 2D GUI acceleration. The line received updates and new architectures throughout the 2000s. It has supported DirectX 7 through DirectX 10, as of 2007, in addition to video processing enhancements for burgeoning high-definition video formats. The ''Radeon'' products were also instrumental in moving to a "top-to-bottom" approach to market segmentation. The technology developed for a specific ''Radeon'' generation could be built in varying levels of robustness, in order to provide products suited for the entire market range, from the extreme high-end, to ''Mobility Radeon'' products, and to the lowest-cost budget application. Later generations expanded this to include flexibility for easy construction of both integrated and discrete parts from the same technology.^[7]

Products

Ruby

In addition to developing high-end GPUs (''graphics processing unit'', something ATI once called a VPU, ''visual processing unit'') for PCs, ATI also designs embedded versions for laptops (called "Mobility Radeon"), PDAs and mobile phones ("Imageon"), integrated motherboards ("Radeon IGP"), set-top boxes ("Xilleon") and other technology-based market segments. Thanks to this diverse portfolio, ATI has been traditionally the dominant player in the OEM and multimedia markets.
ATI promotes some of its products with the fictional "Ruby" character.

Computer graphics chipsets

★ 'Graphics Solutions' - Series of 8-bit ISA cards with MDA, Hercules and CGA compatibility. Later versions added EGA support.

★ 'EGA / VGA Wonder' - IBM "EGA/VGA-compatible" display adapters (1987)

★ 'Mach Series' - Introduced ATI's first 2D GUI "Windows Accelerator". As the series evolved, GUI acceleration improved dramatically and early video acceleration appeared.

★ 'Rage Series' - ATI's first 2D and 3D accelerator chips. The series evolved from rudimentary 3D with 2D GUI acceleration and MPEG-1 capability, to a highly competitive Direct3D 6 accelerator with then "best-in-class" DVD (MPEG2) acceleration. The various chips were very popular with OEMs of the time. The Rage II was used in the first ATI All-In-Wonder multi-function video card, and more advanced All-In-Wonders based on Rage series GPUs followed. (1995-2004)

★
★ 'Rage Mobility' - Designed for use in low-power environments, such as notebooks. These chips were functionally similar to their desktop counterparts, but had additions such as advanced power management, LCD interfaces, and dual monitor functionality.

A Radeon X1900 series graphics card.

★ 'Radeon Series' - Launched in 2000, the Radeon line is ATI's brand for their consumer 3D accelerator add-in cards. The original ''Radeon DDR'' was ATI's first DirectX 7 3D accelerator, introducing their first hardware T&L engine. ATI often produced 'Pro' versions with higher clock speeds, and sometimes an extreme 'XT' version, and even more recently 'XT Platinum Edition (PE) and XTX' versions. The Radeon series was the basis for many ATI All-In-Wonder boards.

★
★ 'Mobility Radeon' - A series of power-optimized versions of Radeon graphics chips for use in laptops. They introduced innovations such as modularized RAM chips, DVD (MPEG2) acceleration, notebook GPU card sockets, and "PowerPlay" power management technology.

★
★ 'ATI CrossFire' - This technology was ATI's response to NVIDIA's SLI platform. It allowed, by using a secondary video card and a dual PCI-E motherboard based on an ATI Crossfire-compatible chipset, the ability to combine the power of the two video cards to increase performance through a variety of different rendering options. There is an option for additional PCI-E video card plugging into the third PCI-E slot for gaming physics, or another option to do physics on the second video card.^[8]

★ 'FireGL' - Launched in 2001, following ATI's acquisition of FireGL Graphics from Diamond Multimedia. Workstation CAD/CAM video card, based on the Radeon series.

★ 'FireMV' - For workstations, featuring multi-view, a technology for the need of multiple displays for workstations with 2D acceleration only, usually based on the low-end products of the Radeon series.

Personal computer platforms & chipsets

★ 'IGP 3x0, Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP' - ATI's first chipsets. Included a DirectX 7-level 3D graphics processor.

★ '9100 IGP' - 2nd generation system chipset. IXP250 southbridge. It was notable for being ATI's first complete motherboard chipset, including an ATI-built southbridge. It included an updated DirectX 8.1 class graphics processor. ^[9]

★ 'Xpress 200/200P' - PCI Express-based Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 chipset. Supports SATA as well as integrated graphics with DirectX 9.0 support, the first integrated graphics chipset to do so.^[10]

★ 'Xpress 3200' - similar to ''Xpress 200'', but designed for optimal CrossFire performance.

★
★ 'AMD 580X CrossFire chipset' - AMD edition of ''Xpress 3200'' renamed, due to AMD acquisition of ATI.

★ '690G, Xpress 1250' -- for AMD and Intel platforms. Includes DirectX 9 graphics processor improved over ''Xpress 200'' ^[11] and industry first native HDMI implementation on motherboards.

Intel IGP chipset deal

In addition to the above chipset ATI has announced that a deal has been struck with CPU and Motherboard manufacturers as of 2005, particularly Asus and Intel, to create onboard 3D Graphics solutions for Intel's new range of motherboards that will be released with their range of Intel Pentium M-based desktop processors, the Intel Core and Intel Core 2 processors, the D101GGC and D101GGC2 chipset (codenamed "''Grand Country''" ^[12]) based on the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. However, high-end boards with integrated graphics processor (IGP) will still use Intel integrated graphics processors. The deal with Intel was deemed to be officially ended with the purchase of ATI Technologies from AMD in July 2006, with Intel announcing SiS IGP chipset (D201GLY chipset, codenamed "''Little Valley''") for entry-level desktop platform, replacing the "''Grand Country''" series chipsets.

Multimedia and Digital TV solutions

★ 'All-In-Wonder' series - A series of multimedia graphics cards which incorporating TV tuner and Radeon family graphics cards onto one add-in card, current developments stopped and discontinued. ^[13]

★ TV tuners

★
★ 'TV Wonder' and 'HDTV Wonder' - a chipset family providing TV reception of various analog TV and digital TV signals with first generation AVIVO technology.

★
★ 'Theatre' - a family of QAM and VSB demodulators for the Digital Cable ready and ATSC environments.

★ 'Xilleon' - A 32-bit MIPS processor featuring hardware decoding of MPEG2, H.264 and VC-1 encoding and decoding.

★ 'Remote Wonder', wireless remote control series for ATI multimedia products. Operates using radio frequency, away from mainstream implementations using infrared.

Console graphics solutions

★ 'Flipper' - The Nintendo GameCube contains a 3D accelerator developed by ''ArtX, Inc'', a company acquired by ATI towards the end of development of the GPU. Flipper is similar in capability to a Direct3D 7 accelerator chip. It consists of 4 rendering pipelines, with hardware T&L, and some limited pixel shader support. Innovatively the chip has 3 MiB of embedded 1T-SRAM for use as ultra-fast low-latency (6.2 ns) texture and framebuffer/Z-buffer storage allowing 10.4 GB/second bandwidth (extremely fast for the time). Flipper was designed by members of the Nintendo 64 Reality Coprocessor team who moved from SGI. The Flipper team went on to have a major hand in development of the Radeon 9700.

★ 'Xenos' - Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console contains a custom graphics chip produced by ATI, known as "R500", "C1", or more often as ''Xenos''. Some of these features include the embedded DRAM (eDRAM). The Xenos also features the “True Unified Shader Architecture” which dynamically loads and balances pixel and vertex processing amongst a bank of identically capable processing units. This differs greatly from past-generations PC graphics chips that have separate banks of processors designed for their individual task (vertex/pixel). Another feature presented in Xenos is the hardware surface tessellation to devide a surface into smaller triangles, similar to TruForm in terms of functionality, which is an advanced feature as it is not presented even in the most up-to-date DirectX 10 specification. The latest-generation Radeon R600 GPU core inherited most of the features presented in Xenos, except eDRAM.

★ 'Hollywood' - Successor to Flipper. Used in Nintendo's latest gaming console, Wii.

Handheld chipsets

★ 'Imageon' - System-on-a-chip (SoC) design introduced in 2002 to bring integrated 2D and 3D graphics to handhelds devices, cellphones and Tablet PCs. Current top-of-line product is the Imageon 2298 which includes DVD quality recording and playback, TV output, and supports up to a 12 megapixel camera, with another line of Imageon products, the 2300 series supporting OpenGL ES 1.1+ extensions. The Imageon line was rebranded under AMD, after AMD acquired ATI in Q3 2006, as 'AMD Imageon'.

★ 'Imageon TV' - Announced in February 2006, allowing handhelds devices to receive digital boardcast TV (DVB-H) signals and enables watching TV programs on these devices, the chipset includes tuner, demodulator, decoder, and a full software stack, operates alongside the Imageon chip.

★ Besides full products, ATI has also supplied 3D and 2D graphics components to other vendors, specifically the Qualcomm ^[14] 7000 series SoC chips of handheld.

★ ATI claimed in May 2006, that it had sold over 100 million^[15] 'cell phone media co-processors,' significantly more than ATI's rival NVIDIA, and announced in February 2007 that the firm had shipped a total of 200 million of Imageon products since 2003 ^[16].

High Performance Computing

★ 'FireStream', rebranded as 'AMD Stream Processor', utilizing the stream processing concept, together with Close to Metal (CTM) hardware interface.

Operating system drivers

:''See also: Radeon''
ATI currently provides proprietary drivers for Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. Linux users have the option of both the old proprietary (R200 and above) and new open source (R480 and below) drivers.
In an interview with AMD official Hal Speed it was suggested that AMD were strongly considering making at least a functional part of the ATI drivers open source. [1]. However, at least until the merger with AMD was complete, ATI had no plans to release their drivers as open source code:
As of July 2007, Mobility Radeon drivers have not been released by ATI for Windows Vista. The in-the-box drivers from Microsoft that these chips will use do not have a native OpenGL ICD included. They instead use Microsoft's OpenGL to Direct3D translation layer which is not as fast as an native OpenGL driver. However, this is an improvement from Windows XP and prior Windows operating systems which did not include any sort of hardware OpenGL support. A solution to the lack of official Vista Mobility Raden drivers is to use the Mod Tool to modify desktop Radeon drivers to install for Mobility Radeon chips.
On September 06, 2007, AMD announced that it will make code and specifications for ATI graphics cards available, AMD confirmed that everything necessary for community driven and maintained 2D and 3D drivers for ATI Radeon X1000, HD 2000, and newer graphics will be made available. The firm will release documentation that allows third part developers to build and support their own drivers.
[3]
[4]
[5]

References

1. K.Y. Ho biography on ATI website
2. press release
3. Press Release
4. AMD page
5. AMD 2006 December Analyst Day page
6. AMD 2007 Analyst Day page
7. TeamB3D. Sir Eric Demers on AMD R600, Beyond3D, June 14, 2007: p.3.
8. DailyTech report
9. Gavrichenkov, Ilya. ATI RADEON 9100 IGP Integrated Chipset Review, X-bit Labs, December 1, 2003.
10. Wasson, Scott. ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 chipset, Tech Report, November 8, 2004.
11. ATI product page of Xpress 1250
12.
13. DailyTech report
14. , page 10 and 15
15. The Inquirer report
16. AMD press release, retrieved July 27, 2007

External links

★ AMD's Graphics Division

★ AMD's great gaming Website

★ ATI Corporate Milestones document

★ FiringSquad's History of ATI

★ ATI headquarters at Google Maps

★ Official AMD ATI Merger Site on AMD Website

★ ATI adapters sorted by popularity

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