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ATI almost ready to roll on Hypermemory |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 09 November 2004 |
We've been hearing that ATI has
been having problems spinning its new Hypermemory marchitecture out the door,
and that it has had to go back to the drawing board to have another fiddle with
it. In the next two weeks, however, ATI will be taking to the road with working samples, to show
the technology to a clamouring press. This, we are informed, means that we might
just see boards with the technology shipping in time for the Christmas
rush.
 ATI almost ready to roll on Hypermemory
ATI wouldn't tell us anything about the Hypermemory technology, other than to confirm that it would be "showcasing" it in a couple of weeks time. System
builders are screaming at ATI to get it out the door, since they want to start building Longhorn-compliant DX9 PCs for corporate customers.
A pre-Christmas launch would be good news for ATI, which is sitting pretty after turning over a big fat wodge of cash this year, $2.2bn to be precise. The Mercury figures that showed ATI beating nVidia in mid-range and low-end graphics
cards will no doubt be bolstered again next quarter if ATI can ship this technology in time. ATI spinsters have been busy explaining to key customers that it has the largest market share in discrete graphics according to those Mercury numbers, after it toppled nVidia last quarter.
ATI first paper-launched this technology way back through the mists of time - September to be precise. Utilising PCI Express, graphics cards using the technology are able to use system memory to store textures and to enable graphics processing. This means that graphics cards can be shipped with less RAM, cutting costs.
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