ATI

The Friday one o'clock appointment was scheduled for ATI. In the meeting room I bumped into Chris Hook, a brilliant and very clever man. The main reason for my appointment however was to meet Andrzej Bania who is helping Guru3D.com a lot in terms of ATI support and information. I expected him to be a very bad English speaking Russian guy. So it's like this, the man is polish and speaks English so fluidly that my language skills are placed at the level of an absolute shame.

First off, if you had a look at the picture above you noticed it already, this year ATI had its 20th anniversary. Fantastic news of course, they had a huge part of a hall rented with some amazing stuff to show. The history of ATI ever since 1995 up-to now was on display, lot's of stuff for consumers, little shows. A very nice job indeed.

The entire staff of Guru3D.com of course wishes ATI our best regards and may they add another 20 years to their fine reputation of products, congratulations ATI!

Back to the meeting, pretty basic stuff we talked about SLI. We know for sure that their cores can handle it but after going a little deeper into the conversation I couldn't help feeling a rather antagonistic tone from Chris Hook regarding SLI and of course NVIDIA's approach (drivers/scalability) to it. Despite the rumors I'm really not confident that ATI will do some sort of SLI solution for the big market. The fact that they actually could do it is something else. No information was disclosed regarding the R520, which is what everybody is talking about, but I do expect that particular product in May. Other then that in the near future we'll see more and more All-in-Wonder products within the x800 line of the Radeons. I always loved the AIWs for sure.

Of course and I already have shown it, this is the new Rialto chip. It's a bridge chip to make PCI-express VPUs compatible with the AGP bus. This offers ATI a lot of flexibility as they can basically use it on any VPU.