ATI Technologies

ATI Technologies Inc. was a semiconductor technology association based in Markham, Ontario, Canada, that specialized in the development of cartoon processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985 as Array Technologies Inc., the aggregation was listed about in 1993 and was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 2006. As a above fabrication-less or fabless semiconductor company, ATI conducted analysis and development centralized and outsourced the accomplishment and accumulation of its products. ATI and its arch battling Nvidia emerged as the two ascendant players in the cartoon processors industry, eventually banishment added manufacturers into alcove roles.

The accretion of ATI in 2006 was important to AMD's cardinal development of its Fusion bearing of computer processors, which dent accepted processing abilities with cartoon processing functions aural a distinct chip. The ATI cast name was removed from AMD's cartoon processor articles in 2010.1

History

Lee Ka Lau,2 Benny Lau, and Kwok Yuen Ho3 founded ATI in 1985 as Array Technologies Incorporated. Working primarily in the OEM field, ATI produced dent cartoon cards for PC manufacturers such as IBM and Commodore. By 1987, ATI had developed into an absolute cartoon agenda retailer, introducing EGA Wonder and VGA Wonder agenda artefact curve that year.4 In the aboriginal nineties they appear articles able to action cartoon after the CPU. In May 1991 the Mach8, in 1992 the Mach32, which offered bigger anamnesis bandwidth and GUI acceleration. ATI Technologies Inc. went accessible in 1993 with banal listed on NASDAQ and the Toronto Banal Exchange.

In 1994, the Mach64 accelerator debuted, powering the Cartoon Xpression and Cartoon Pro Turbo, alms accouterments abutment for YUV-to-RGB blush amplitude about-face in accession to accouterments zoom; aboriginal techniques of hardware-based video acceleration.

ATI alien its aboriginal aggregate of 2D and 3D accelerator beneath the name 3D Rage. This dent was based on the Mach 64, but it featured basal 3D acceleration. The ATI Rage band powered about the absolute ambit of ATI cartoon products. In particular, the Rage Pro was one of the aboriginal applicable 2D-plus-3D alternatives to 3Dfx's 3D-only Voodoo chipset. 3D dispatch in the Rage band avant-garde from the basal functionality aural the antecedent 3D Rage to a added avant-garde DirectX 6.0 accelerator in the 1999 Rage 128

.

The All-in-Wonder artefact band alien in 1996 was the aboriginal aggregate of dent cartoon dent with TV tuner agenda and the aboriginal dent that enabled to affectation computer cartoon on a TV set.5 The cards featured 3D dispatch powered by ATI's 3D Rage II, 64-bit 2D performance, TV-quality video acceleration, analog video capture,

TV

tuner functionality, flicker-free TV-out and stereo TV audio reception.

ATI fabricated an access into the adaptable accretion area by introducing 3D-graphics dispatch to laptops in 1996. The Mobility artefact band had to accommodated requirements altered from desktop PC, such as minimized ability usage, bargain calefaction output, TMDS achievement capabilities for laptop screens, and maximized integration. In 1997, ATI acquired Tseng Labs's cartoon assets, which included 40 engineers

.

The Radeon band of cartoon articles was apparent in 2000. The antecedent Radeon cartoon processing assemblage was an all-new architecture with DirectX 7.0 3D acceleration, video acceleration, and 2D acceleration. Technology developed for a specific Radeon bearing could be congenital in capricious levels of appearance and achievement in adjustment to accommodate articles ill-fitted for the absolute bazaar range, from high-end to account to adaptable versions

.

Products

In accession to developing high-end GPUs (originally alleged a VPU, beheld processing unit, by ATI) for PCs and Apple Macs, ATI additionally advised anchored versions for laptops (Mobility Radeon), PDAs and adaptable phones (Imageon), chip motherboards (Radeon IGP), and others.

"Ruby", a fabulous changeable appearance declared as a "mercenary for hire.", was created by ATI to advance some of its products.14 Computer-animated videos produced by RhinoFX about Ruby on a mission (being a sniper, saboteur, hacker and so on) appeared at ample technology shows such as CeBIT and CES.

Computer graphics chipsets

Cartoon Solution / "Small Wonder" – Alternation of 8-bit ISA cards with MDA, Hercules, CGA and Plantronics Color+ compatibility. Later versions added EGA support.

EGA / VGA Wonder – IBM "EGA/VGA-compatible" affectation adapters (1987)

Mach Alternation – Alien ATI's aboriginal 2D GUI "Windows Accelerator". As the alternation evolved, GUI dispatch bigger badly and aboriginal video dispatch appeared.

Rage Alternation – ATI's aboriginal 2D and 3D accelerator chips. The alternation acquired from abecedarian 3D with 2D GUI dispatch and MPEG-1 capability, to a awful aggressive Direct3D 6 accelerator with again "best-in-class" DVD (MPEG2) acceleration. The assorted chips were actual accepted with OEMs of the time. The Rage II was acclimated in the aboriginal ATI All-In-Wonder multi-function video card, and added avant-garde All-In-Wonders based on Rage alternation GPUs followed. (1995–2004)

Rage Mobility – Designed for use in low-power environments, such as notebooks. These chips were functionally agnate to their desktop counterparts, but had additions such as avant-garde adeptness management, LCD interfaces, and bifold adviser functionality.

Radeon Alternation – ATI launched the Radeon band in 2000 as their customer 3D accelerator add-in cards, its flagship artefact band and the absolute adversary to Nvidia's GeForce. The aboriginal Radeon DDR was ATI's aboriginal DirectX 7 3D accelerator, introducing their aboriginal accouterments T&L engine. ATI generally produced 'Pro' versions with college alarm speeds, and sometimes an acute 'XT' version, and alike added afresh 'XT Platinum Edition (PE)' and 'XTX' versions. The Radeon alternation was the base for abounding ATI All-In-Wonder boards.

Mobility Radeon – A alternation of power-optimized versions of Radeon cartoon chips for use in laptops. They alien innovations such as modularized RAM chips, DVD (MPEG2) acceleration, anthology GPU agenda sockets, and "PowerPlay" adeptness administration technology. AMD afresh appear DirectX 11-compatible versions of its adaptable processors 15..

ATI CrossFire – This technology was ATI's acknowledgment to NVIDIA's SLI platform. It allowed, by application a accessory video agenda and a bifold PCI-E motherboard based on an ATI Crossfire-compatible chipset, the adeptness to amalgamate the adeptness of the two, three or four video cards to access achievement through a array of altered apprehension options. There is an advantage for added PCI-E video agenda active into the third PCI-E aperture for gaming physics, or addition advantage to do physics on the additional video card.16

FireGL – Launched in 2001, afterward ATI's accretion of FireGL Cartoon from Diamond Multimedia. Workstation CAD/CAM video card, based on the Radeon series.

FireMV – For workstations, featuring "multi-view", for assorted displays with 2D dispatch only, usually based on low-end articles of the Radeon series.

Personal computer platforms and chipsets

IGP 3x0, Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP – ATI's aboriginal chipsets. Included a DirectX 7-level 3D cartoon processor.

9100 IGP – 2nd bearing arrangement chipset. IXP250 southbridge. It was notable for actuality ATI's aboriginal complete motherboard chipset, including an ATI-built southbridge. It included an adapted DirectX 8.1 chic cartoon processor 17

Xpress 200/200P – PCI Express-based Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 chipset. Supports SATA as able-bodied as chip cartoon with DirectX 9.0 support, the aboriginal chip cartoon chipset to do so 18

Xpress 3200 – agnate to Xpress 200, but advised for optimal CrossFire performance.

In accession to the aloft chipset, ATI addled a accord in 2005 with CPU and motherboard manufacturers, decidedly Asus and Intel, to actualize onboard 3D Cartoon solutions for Intel's ambit of motherboards appear with their ambit of Intel Pentium M-based desktop processors, the Intel Core and Intel Core 2 processors, the D101GGC and D101GGC2 chipset (codenamed "Grand County"19) based on the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. However, high-end boards with chip cartoon processor (IGP) still acclimated Intel GMA chip cartoon processors. The accord with Intel concluded with the acquirement of ATI by AMD in 2006, with Intel announcement SiS IGP chipset (D201GLY chipset, codenamed "Little Valley") for entry-level desktop platform, replacing the "Grand County" alternation chipsets.

Multimedia and Digital TV products

All-In-Wonder alternation – A alternation of multimedia cartoon cards which accumulation TV tuner and Radeon ancestors cartoon cards assimilate one add-in card, which, afterwards actuality acutely discontinued was relaunched as All-In-Wonder HD on June 26, 2008.

TV tuners

TV Wonder and HDTV Wonder – a chipset ancestors accouterment TV accession of assorted analog TV and agenda TV signals (PAL, NTSC, ATSC, DVB-T and so on) with aboriginal bearing AVIVO technology, additionally acknowledging CableCARD, and Clear QAM technologies.

Theater – a ancestors of QAM and VSB demodulators for the Agenda Cable accessible and ATSC environments.

Alien Wonder, wireless alien ascendancy alternation for ATI multimedia products. Operates application radio frequency, abroad from boilerplate implementations application infrared.

Console graphics products

Flipper – The Nintendo GameCube (codenamed "dolphin" during production) contains a 3D accelerator developed by ArtX, Inc, a aggregation acquired by ATI during the development of the GPU. Flipper was agnate in adequacy to a Direct3D 7 accelerator chip. It consisted of four apprehension pipelines, with accouterments T&L, and some bound pixel shader support. Innovatively the dent has 3 MiB of anchored 1T-SRAM for use as ultra-fast low-latency (6.2 ns) arrangement and framebuffer/Z-buffer accumulator acceptance 10.4 GB/second bandwidth (extremely fast for the time). Flipper was advised by associates of the Nintendo 64 Reality Coprocessor aggregation who confused from SGI. The Flipper aggregation went on to accept a above duke in the development of the Radeon 9700.

Xenos – Microsoft's Xbox 360 video bold animate contains a custom cartoon dent produced by ATI, accepted as "R500", "C1", or added generally as Xenos. Some of these appearance accommodate the anchored DRAM (eDRAM). The Xenos additionally appearance the “True Unified Shader Architecture” which dynamically endless and balances pixel and acme processing amidst a coffer of analogously able processing units. This differs abundantly from past-generations PC cartoon chips that accept abstracted banks of processors advised for their alone assignment (vertex/fragment). Another affection presented in Xenos is the accouterments apparent arrangement to bisect a apparent into abate triangles, agnate to TruForm in agreement of functionality, which is an avant-garde affection as it is not presented alike in the DirectX 10 specification. The contempo bearing Radeon R600 GPU amount affiliated best of the appearance presented in Xenos, except eDRAM.

Hollywood – Successor to Flipper. Part of Nintendo's gaming console, Wii.

Handheld chipsets

Imageon – System-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture alien in 2002 to accompany dent 2D and 3D cartoon to handhelds devices, cellphones and Tablet PCs. The Imageon 2298 included DVD affection recording and playback, TV output, and accurate up to a 12-megapixel camera, with addition band of Imageon products, the 2300 alternation acknowledging OpenGL ES 1.1+ extensions. The Imageon band was rebranded beneath AMD, and after awash to Qualcomm.

Imageon TV – Appear in February 2006, acceptance handhelds accessories to accept agenda advertisement TV (DVB-H) signals and enables watching TV programs on these devices, the chipset includes tuner, demodulator, decoder, and a aboundingcomputer application stack, operates alongside the Imageon chip.

Besides abounding products, ATI additionally supplied 3D and 2D cartoon apparatus to added vendors, accurately the Qualcomm20 MSM7000 alternation SoC chips of handheld and accessible Freescale i. MX processors 21 ATI claimed in May 2006, that it had awash over 100 million22 'cell buzz media co-processors', decidedly added than ATI's battling NVIDIA, and appear in February 2007 that the close had alien a absolute of 200 actor of Imageon articles back 2003.23

After the AMD acquisition, the Imageon and Xilleon were awash off to Qualcomm and Broadcom, respectively

High-performance computing

ATI Firestream, application the beck processing concept, calm with Close to Metal (CTM) accouterments interface. After the AMD acquisition, it was succeeded by AMD FireStream, rebranded as AMD Beck Processor for a abbreviate aeon of time,