Hasta La Gadget!

ATI, the Canadian graphics-chip company born back in 1985, is dead. After being acquired by AMD in 2006, and spending the intervening four years locked in the Californian chip-maker’s cellar, forced to try on dresses that “make it look purty”, the deed has finally been done: the ATI name has been erased from all products.

The acquisition brought one of the Big Two GPU-makers (the other is NVIDIA) into the AMD’s CPU business, but ATI managed to keep its name on its inventions until today. From now on, there will still be Radeon and FirePro cards, but they’ll be called AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro.

Why? AMD is moving firmly into combined CPU-GPU systems, which put everything together for energy and space savings. Think of the Intel GMA 950 which was used in MacBooks and Mac Minis, along with PC hardware. These “integrated graphics” systems share the main RAM with the CPU, further saving money but also offering lesser performance. AMD decided that these combined systems would be too confusing with all the different branding, and dropped ATI like the hot girl drops the dork with a car after they arrive together at the school prom.

Best of all, AMD has redesigned the stickers for its chips, and there are actually two sets. One drops all mention of even the AMD name, replacing it with the word “graphics” so when its discrete graphics cards ship in Intel boxes, the names won’t clash. So goes the complex corporate maze that lies behind those ugly stickers found on all PCs.

AMD jettisons ATI brand name, makes Radeon its own [The Tech Report]

See Also:

• ATI
• AMD's ATI Uber Graphics Card, DirectX 10 Delayed
• Intel Pays AMD $1.25 billion To Settle All Disputes
• AMD

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Um, oops? ATI’s latest Catalyst driver release has dished out some info that we imagine the company didn’t want to reveal quite yet. The names of some Southern Islands have been spotted — Cayman and Antilles appear to be the flagship chips — suggesting a refresh to the critically acclaimed Evergreen line of GPUs may not be far off. Rumors have been swirling for a while about ATI’s reputed shift to island-based nomenclature, and while hard specs are nowhere to be found, we can see that the Red Team is planning an overhaul with no less than 10 new additions to its roster. Hardly unpredictable, but good to know that ATI has something to counter NVIDIA’s heart-stealing GTX 460.

[Thanks, Jack]

ATI leaks out Southern Islands codenames for next-gen GPUs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We know who the daddy is when it comes to single-card graphics performance, and we’ve even witnessed NVIDIA and ATI duking it out with multiple cards before, but this here roundup is what you might call comprehensive. Comparing a mind-boggling 23 different configurations, the Tech Report guys set out to determine the best bang for your DirectX 11 buck. Their conclusion won’t shock those of you who’ve been following the recent love affair between reviewers and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460: a pair of these eminently affordable cards regularly outpaced the best single-GPU solutions out there. Slightly more intriguing, however, was the discovery that its elder siblings, the GTX 470 and 480, have improved in performance to the point of being markedly ahead of ATI’s Radeon HD 5870, with the blame for this shift being put squarely on the shoulders of NVIDIA’s driver update team. Hurry up and give the source a read while it’s still fresh, we can’t imagine ATI letting this be the status quo for too much longer.

ATI CrossFireX versus NVIDIA SLI: performance scaling showdown originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’d think with ATI having the performance, value and power efficiency lead for so long — at least since the Radeon HD 4000 series — NVIDIA would be in all kinds of trouble, but it’s only now that AMD’s graphics division has finally taken the lead in quarterly shipments. This is according to Mercury Research, whose analysts place the split at 51 to 49 percent in favor of ATI — still a tightly contested thing, but it compares very favorably to the Red Team’s 41% share in the same quarter last year. This data is concerned with discrete GPU shipments only (laptops included), whereas on the integrated front Intel continues to reign supreme with 54 percent of the market shipping its cheap and cheerful IGP units. ATI has made forward strides there as well, however, with 24.5% ranking ahead of NVIDIA’s 19.8%. If Apple shifting its iMac and Mac Pro lines away from the Green livery wasn’t enough, perhaps these numbers will finally start ringing some alarm bells over at NV HQ.

[Thanks, Zubayer]

ATI overtakes NVIDIA in discrete GPU shipments originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 05:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gotta live up to the name, right HP? NVIDIA’s new pro graphics solution for mobile creatives, the Quadro 5000M, was unsheathed only yesterday but HP appears to have been first in line to get some of that new 40nm goodness. Electronista reports that the world leader in PC shipments is readying a 5000M solution for its 8740w EliteBook, which will bring 320 CUDA cores and a jumbo 2GB of dedicated memory to the party. That comes replete with the latest DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 compatibility, naturally, as well as a bunch of pro-friendly computational enhancements. Dell’s also going to be offering a 5000M-equipped rig, but lest you get too excited, bear in mind that getting the current best Quadro-equipped 17-incher from HP costs north of $3,000, so affordability is clearly not a priority here. Skip past the break for NVIDIA’s joyous press release announcing the new Quadro chips.

Continue reading HP crams Fermi-based Quadro 5000M GPU inside 17-inch EliteBook

HP crams Fermi-based Quadro 5000M GPU inside 17-inch EliteBook originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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