ATI Technologies

ATI Technologies Inc.

Fate	Acquired by AMD
Founded	1985
Headquarters	Markham, Ontario, Canada
Key people	Adrian Hartog, president, AMD Canada Rick Bergman, Sr. VP and GM
Industry	Semiconductors
Products	Graphics cards Graphics processing units Motherboard chipsets Video capture cards
Website	ati.amd.com

ATI Technologies Inc. (ATI) was a major designer and supplier of graphics processing units, motherboard chipsets, and video display cards. In 2006, the company was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), although the ATI brand was retained for graphics cards.

ATI was a fabless semiconductor company conducting in-house research and development and outsourcing the manufacturing and assembly of its products. Its main competitor was NVIDIA in the graphics and handheld market. The flagship product, the Radeon series of graphics cards, directly competes with NVIDIA's GeForce. The two companies' dominance of the market forced other manufacturers into niche roles.

History

The company was founded as Array Technologies Incorporated in 1985 by immigrants Kwok Yuen Ho^[1] of Guangzhou, and Benny Lau and Lee Ka Lau of Hong Kong.^[2] Working primarily in the OEM field, it produced integrated graphics cards for large PC manufacturers like IBM and Commodore. By 1987, it had grown into an independent graphics card retailer, introducing EGA Wonder and VGA Wonder graphic card product lines under its brand that year.^[3] In May 1991, the company released Mach8, its first product able to process graphics without the CPU. Mach32 debuted in 1992 and offered improved memory bandwidth and GUI acceleration performance. ATI Technologies Inc. went public in 1993 with stock listed at NASDAQ and Toronto Stock Exchange.

ATI headquarters in Markham, Ontario, Canada.

ATI's Silicon Valley office.

In 1994, the Mach 64 accelerator debuted, powering the Graphics Xpression and Graphics Pro Turbo. It offered hardware support for YUV-to-RGB color space conversion in addition to hardware zoom, early techniques of hardware-based video acceleration.

ATI introduced its first combination of 2D and 3D accelerator under the name 3D Rage. This chip was based on the Mach 64 but it featured elemental 3D acceleration. The ATI Rage line powered almost the entire range of ATI graphics products. In particular, the Rage Pro was one of the first viable 2D-plus-3D alternatives to 3Dfx's 3D-only Voodoo chipset. 3D acceleration in the Rage line advanced from the basic functionality within the initial 3D Rage to a more advanced DirectX 6.0 accelerator in the 1999 Rage 128.

The All-in-Wonder product line introduced in 1996 was the first combination of integrated graphics chip with TV tuner card and the first chip that enabled to display computer graphics on a TV set.^[4] The cards featured 3D acceleration powered by ATI's second generation 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 made an entrance into the mobile computing sector by introducing 3D-graphics acceleration to laptops in 1996. The Mobility product line had to meet requirements different from desktop PC, such as minimized power usage, reduced heat output, TMDS output capabilities for laptop screens, and maximized integration. In 1997, ATI acquired Tseng Labs's graphics assets, which included 40 engineers.

The Radeon line of graphics products was unveiled in 2000. The initial Radeon graphics processing unit was an all-new design with DirectX 7.0 3D acceleration, video acceleration, and 2D acceleration. Technology developed for a specific Radeon generation could be built in varying levels of features and performance in order to provide products suited for the entire market range. The range stretches from the high-end Radeon HD 3000/4000 series, which support DirectX 10.1 Unified shader model technology, to Mobility Radeon products for laptops, and to the budget series, such as Radeon X1300. Later generations expanded this to include flexibility for easy construction of both integrated and discrete parts from the same technology.^[5]

In 2000, ATI acquired ArtX, which engineered the Flipper graphics chip used in the Nintendo GameCube game console. They have also created a modified version of the chip (codenamed Hollywood) for the successor of the GameCube, the Wii. ATI was contracted by Microsoft to create the graphics core (codenamed Xenos) for the Xbox 360. Later in 2005, ATI acquired Terayon's Cable Modem Silicon Intellectual Property strengthening their lead in the consumer digital television market.^[6] K. Y. Ho remained as Chairman of the Board until he retired in November 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 $5.4 billion. The merger closed on October 25, 2006.^[7] The acquisition consideration included over $2 billion financed from a loan and 56 million shares of AMD stock.^[8] ATI retained its name, logos and trademarks. ATI's then CEO Dave Orton was made the Executive Vice President of Visual and Media Businesses.^[9]

It was reported that in December 2006 AMD/ATI, along with its main rival NVIDIA, received subpoenas from the United States Department of Justice regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics card industry.^[10]

In July 2007, AMD announced the resignation of Dave Orton. ATI, a subsidiary of AMD, is called the Graphics Product Group (GPG) inside the company.^[11] The top-level management of the Graphics Product Group consists of Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager and Adrian Hartog, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Consumer Electronics Group. Both report to Héctor de Jesús Ruiz, CEO and Chairman of AMD.^[12]

Products

In addition to developing high-end GPUs (originally called a VPU, visual processing unit, by ATI) for PCs, ATI also designs embedded versions for laptops (Mobility Radeon), PDAs and mobile phones (Imageon), integrated motherboards (Radeon IGP), set-top boxes (Xilleon) and others.

ATI promotes some of its products with the fictional "Ruby" female character, a "mercenary for hire."^[13] Computer animated videos produced by RhinoFX about Ruby on a mission (being a sniper, saboteur, hacker and so on) are displayed at large technology shows such as CeBIT, CES.

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.^[14]
• 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 and chipsets

See also: Comparison of ATI chipsets and Comparison of AMD 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. ^[15]
• 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.^[16]
• 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 ^[17] and industry first native HDMI implementation on motherboards.
• AMD 700 chipset series - exclusively for AMD processors, this is a chipset family supporting Phenom processors and Quad FX enthusiast platform (790FX), enthusiast chipset (790X), IGP (790GX, 780G, 740G) and single graphics card variants (770, 740) aimed at mainstream and value computing systems available.

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 County" ^[18]) based on the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. However, high-end boards with integrated graphics processor (IGP) will still use Intel GMA 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 County" 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, who, after being seemingly discontinued was relaunched as All-In-Wonder HD on June 26, 2008.
• TV tuners
  • TV Wonder and HDTV Wonder - a chipset family providing TV reception of various analog TV and digital TV signals (PAL, NTSC, ATSC, DVB-T and so on) with first generation AVIVO technology, also supporting CableCARD, and Clear QAM technologies.
  • 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 during the 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/fragment). Another feature presented in Xenos is the hardware surface tessellation to divide 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. Part of 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 broadcast 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^[19] MSM7000 series SoC chips of handheld and upcoming Freescale i. MX processors ^[20].
• ATI claimed in May 2006, that it had sold over 100 million^[21] '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 ^[22].

High Performance Computing

• AMD FireStream, originally ATI Firestream, and previously rebranded as AMD Stream Processor for short period of time, utilizing the stream processing concept, together with Close to Metal (CTM) hardware interface.

ATI graphics drivers

Main article: ATI Catalyst

ATI currently provides proprietary drivers, called ATI Catalyst, 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 the functional part of the ATI drivers open source.^[23] However, at least until the merger with AMD was complete, ATI had no plans to release their drivers as open source code:

Proprietary, patented optimizations are part of the value we provide to our customers and we have no plans to release these drivers to open source. In addition, multimedia elements such as content protection must not, by their very nature, be allowed to go open source.

—ATI statement, August 2006

See also

• AMD
• Comparison of ATI chipsets
• Comparison of ATI Graphics Processing Units
• Fglrx – Linux display driver used for ATI video cards
• HIS Digital
• Radeon
• Radeon R700
• Video card
• Video In Video Out (VIVO)

References

External links

• AMD's Graphics Division
• AMD GAME! - AMD's gaming website
• ATI Corporate Milestones document
• FiringSquad's History of ATI
• Official AMD ATI Merger Site on AMD Website