CeBIT`2004: Expo Coverage - Spire
Video cards
HIS
The company is a true adherent of ATI, and is not going to produce video cards on NVIDIA chips at all. It also one of the first companies who changed the frequency on its "Radeon 9600XT Turbo" from standard 600 MHz to 650 MHz..
HIS Radeon 9600XT TurboYou would ask - what's so big about it? For ATI products, it is quite a deed. ATI hates departure from the canon. Even Sapphire who released SE cards cut down in bus bandwidth was almost excommunicated and even fell into big disgrace. ATI was so infuriated that even bought back the control stock of CP and handed the production over to them (I didn't tell you about that.. :-).
Still up till recent times, HIS products was listed in Russian price-lists as a "noname product", to no purpose indeed. Those Hong Kong guys have been around on the market for a hundred years and are in big favor in the South East Asia. Recalling Radeon 9800Pro cards looking like twins (and manufactured at a CP factory), we can note the only thing that falls outside the row - Excalibur Radeon 9800Pro IceQ, where "Excalibur" is a trademark of HIS video cards, and the "IceQ" is the name for their cooling systems.
HIS Excalibur Radeon 9800Pro IceQWhat's going on?
The issue of the real-world production as to "who produces what to whom" is extremely entangled and requires some explanation. As a rule, ATI and NVIDIA exercise a rigid control over the production of "key solutions", i.e. either top-end cards or predecessors of the mid-end lines (e.g., FX5700Ultra) which absolutely all are a copy of the reference design and are manufactured at the same production line, at least in the beginning. This is related to the problem of observing strictest confidentiality of such announcements. It is simply impossible that technological samples and documentation can be handed over to each and every partner of the company. In the former times, when partners were strictly divided into followers of ATI and NVIDIA, all was somehow simpler - companies received information on products at the same time and could get round to exploring the documentation.
Now partners are divided into primary and secondary. The secondary are those who deal with all the manufacturers of video chips. It's just they who might be the sources of information leakage to competitors regarding release dates, frequencies, innovations etc. the key data about future products. Therefore they are provided with pre-ordered number of new cards for initial familiarization with new produce.
Top-end cards are extremely difficult in production, and their quality requirements are very rigid. Plus their sales do not make up more than 10% of the whole video cards market. It's extremely prohibitive to divert their production at tens of factories. Another thing is the mid-end and low-end solutions which need to be produced in millions of pieces. At that, partners are allowed to make use of their technological tricks and experience: for ATI cards, it applies mostly to boards redesign and use of cooling systems, whereas for NVIDIA it can be applied to whatever.
The secrecy on such perishable product market like video chips is the key strategy. No one will ever make their GPU structural diagrams, even for outdated solutions, unlike Intel and AMD who work at a new core normally for three to four years.
Hunting for the competitor secrets and keeping own secrets intact is the daily concern for any business. Can you imagine how XGI is now hunting for the ForceWare and Catalyst source codes? Adapting other developments to your own architecture is twice as easy rather than bringing hundreds of games from the archives to light, verifying them for operational stability and solving the issues that arise with your own sweat and blood. It may take about five years when XGI can finally create something worth of Catalyst, but during all these years they will be behind the scene albeit having the super exclusive core and excellent scaling technology which is available at them for real.
A few notes on the scaling. From the very first chip, 3dfx (let them be remembered for ever) was absolutely right considering the opportunity - the interlaced image processing made by each video card gave a two-fold performance gain. In its passed away MAXX series of video cards (two chips onboard), ATI in the end failed to make the driver work correctly. With the acquisition of 3dfx by NVIDIA, the latter acquired all their developments including those to do with multi-chip cards, just what they were working at on the threshold of their demise. The question is still open: does NVIDIA really have a grand piano in the bush in the form of multi-chip configurations, and if yes, is the company going to implement them eventually? Is such technology being considered by ATI as a margin for performance increase and as a means of moving computer graphics closer to solving the photorealism problem which is still a very long way to go?
Another approach may be in the use of multiple cores of the graphics chip, i.e. generation of several (two,four) full-featured GPUs on a single chip. At least, Intel has already declared its migration towards multiple cores, thus completing the logical chain: HT (multisequencing of operations on the level of a single core), MCore (multiple cores on a single chip, each supporting HT) and SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing of these multi-core monsters). Of course, implementation of this idea will require a revision of today's programming ideology, programmers' mindsets, creation of new programming tools etc.. Our beloved graphics fanciers, ATI and NVIDIA, do not possess financial resources of Intel for such industrial revolutions and are most likely to sit safely under the cover of their environmental niche, content with just another duplication in the number of pipelines per chip with simultaneous migration to finer process technologies. But sooner or later they will inevitably come up against the physical limit of the crystal lattice! This time may come in about five years.
Well, who knows what may be in about five years :-) Maybe VIA and hot Finnish guys will rule solving further problems of graphics multi-core architecture and multiprocessing jointly with developers' companies...
Abit
At CeBit'2004, Abit announced their first "Volary DUO V8 Ultra" card.
ABIT Volary DUO V8 Ultra 256Mb DDRIs it a reference from XGI? Not really. The reference looks quite different:
XGI Volary DUO V8 Ultra 256Mb DDRThat it would happen we informed still on 3 February, and were right :). Also in February, there was an announcement of ABIT cards made on ATI chips. Even more, the secret RV380 found some space at ABIT expo stand:
ABIT RV380And in so doing, the company does not intend to cease its cooperation with NVIDIA. Inscrutable are your ways, Lord.
 
Vika (Abit, Taiwan) and Anna (Abit-Moscow).
How lucky you, ABIT, are with pretty Russian ladies!Currently, ABIT is holding its first international championship. The cyber-sport is on the up and is emerging from the shabby basements to the bright light. In South Korea, there works a round-the-clock channel.. Following the example of Samsung and LG, champions are winning prestigious cars and earn hundreds of thousand dollars prizes for their teams. Not millions yet, like it is in professional boxing or football, but something. And that's only the beginning.
Russian cyber-sports team takes active part in ABIT championship. All the finalists are up to Shankhai once the June's Computex is over. Let's support the Russian united team! 3DNews is a media sponsor of the competition and we'll be publishing detailed coverage of the competitions straight from the events. Keep up with the news.. :-)
Prolink
Just one more company that prefers its own solutions is Prolink. It produce (the PixelView brand) differs from tens of analogs by the proprietary PDFII/PDF cooling system and compulsory thermal control unit. If in its standard make it was placed onboard the card, now there may be a version with the system brought over to the front panel:
 
Prolink FX 5900XT Golden LimitedPCI-E version of the PCX 5950:
 Prolink PCX 5950Even PCX 5300 (analog of FX5200) with the PDFII cooling system looks like hi-end! There's something to show to friends.
 Prolink PCX 5300Photo of the day: Cyberfight.ru
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