Find ATI's model history

Founder: He

Founded in 1985, it is the world's leading supplier of graphics cards, video equipment and multimedia products. Its products are widely used in desktops, workstations, notebook computers, digital TVs, mobile phones and game devices. With its strength in staff, products and excellent technology, customer-oriented strategy, insight and application ability in new technologies and key market areas, ATI has become a pioneer, innovator and leader in the graphics card industry.

ATI's business consists of two core parts.

Personal computer business:

As the core business of the company, ATI company provides top graphics performance for PC and workstation users with its top technology on PC platform. The radium series graphic processors produced by ATI adopt the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology, which will bring top-level visual experience to PC users. ATI's mobile radium graphic processor specially produced for mobile products has occupied more than half of the notebook computer market. This graphics processor can provide more exciting functions without reducing the performance, processing power and mobility of the machine. ATI's integrated graphics products enable valuable people and mainstream users to obtain high-performance graphics processing functions at affordable desktop and PC prices.

Consumer electronics business:

In the past few years, based on the demand for richer visual experience, the entire consumer electronics industry has been pursuing higher image processing functions. ATI's Imageon graphics processor for mobile phone and Xilleon graphics processor for digital TV came into being. At the same time, ATI provides graphics processors for Nintendo's GameCube console, and signs future technical agreements with Nintendo and Microsoft Xbox products.

ATI has more than 2,500 employees. Its headquarters are located in markham and Luoan respectively, and it has offices in the United States, Europe and Asia. Its products are developed in R&D centers in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Ontario and Pennsylvania, and produced in Canada and Taiwan Province. In 2004, ATI's financial income reached $2 billion. The company's shares are publicly traded on NASDAQ (stock code ATYT) and Toronto Stock Exchange (stock code ATY), and it is one of the top 100 stocks on NASDAQ.

Due to poor management, ATI was acquired by AMD for $5.4 billion in 2006.

ATi event review

1985 On August 20th, ATi Company was established.

In June+10, 5438, ATi developed the first graphics chip and graphics card using ASIC technology.

1July, 987, ATi released EGA Wonder and VGA Wonder graphics cards.

1April, 988, ATi participated in the formulation of VESA standard.

1991may, ATi released the Mach8 dual-chip graphics card.

1April 1992, ATi released Mach32 graphics card, which integrated graphics acceleration function.

ATi released VLB(VESA local bus) and PCI bus products.

In May, ATi established a German subsidiary.

1993 1 1 ATi became a listed company, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, stock code: ATY.

1In August, 994, ATi released the Mach64 graphics chip.

165438+ 10 ATi's graphics card driver and application software can support 13 languages.

1June 1995 ATi became the first graphics card manufacturer to support Apple MAC, and also the first manufacturer to support dual platforms of PC and MAC.

1996 65438+ 10 ATi released the first 3D graphics chip in the industry, and sold more than 1 10,000 pieces in one year.

In July, ATi established the Irish company as the operational headquarters in Europe.

In August, ATi announced the first PCI substrate for MAC.

In September, ATi became the first company to display computer images on TV.

165438+ 10 ATi became the first company to introduce 3D graphics chips into the notebook market.

ATi became the first company to attach a TV card to a display card.

1997 In February, ATi released 3D RAGE II+ DVD chip, which is the first software product for graphics acceleration and DVD screen compensation.

In March this year, ATi became the first company to release a product that fully supports AGP 2X.

ATi became the first company to provide hardware DVD acceleration products.

1April 1998 ATi was selected as the market leader in graphics chip industry by IDC.

In May, ATi provided more OEM products for PC manufacturers with top market share 10.

In August, ATi became the leader of AGP market, and sold10 million AGP graphics chips.

ATi released RAGE MAGNUM graphics chip, which is a product aimed at high-end OEM customers.

ATi released a new generation RAGE 128 GL graphics chip.

In September, ATi's RAGE LT PRO graphics chip led the notebook market.

In June+10, 5438, ATi obtained the system-on-a-chip (SOC) technology developed by Chromatic Research Inc

ATi acquired MIPS processors through the acquisition of SiByte Inc

1999 65438+ 10 K.Y. Ho, CEO of ATI Company, was selected as one of the 25 most influential business leaders by Economic Weekly.

In February, ATi released RAGE MOBILITY M 1, which is the world's first notebook graphics chip with 8M memory.

ATi's RAGE 128 Pro is the first in 3D WinBench99 to score more than 700 points. RAGE FURY 32MB based on RAGE 128 scored 743 Winmarks, making it the fastest graphics card in the world.

In April this year, ATi sold 5 million RAGE mobile graphics chips.

In July, ATi's annual sales reached $654.38+0 billion.

In February 2000, ATi became a global leader in mobile graphics solutions.

In April, ATi completed the acquisition of ArtX Inc, K.Y. Ho became the chairman and CEO of ATi, and David E. Orton became the chairman and chief operating officer of the board.

ATi released RADEON graphics chip, which is the most powerful graphics processor in the world. RADEON marks ATi's entry into the market of high-end games and 3D workstations.

In February 20001year, ATi released the MOBILITY RADEON graphics chip.

In March, ATi acquired FireGL chips, thus entering the market of high-performance graphics workstations.

In July, ATi obtained HYDRAVISION desktop management software.

In August, ATi released RADEON 8500, which is the first product that fully supports DirectX 8. 1 specification.

ATi released FireGL 8800 workstation graphics card.

ATi releases mobile RADEON 7500.

ATi released the Miracle RADEON 8500DV.

On June+10, 5438, ATi released the XILLEON 220, which is the most integrated system-on-chip product in the world.

ATi released RADEON 7000 and 7200.

165438+ 10, ATi released the MOBILITY FireGL 7800 and FireGL 8700 workstation graphics cards.

June 5438+October 2002 10, ATi Company obtained the permanent membership of OPenGL Standards Committee.

ATi released RADEON 8500 MAC and RADEON 7000 MAC dual-head graphics cards.

ATi entered the wireless market with IMAGEON 100 specially designed for PDA and smart phone.

ATi released the System Integrator Partner Program in North America in April.

In June, ATi obtained the set-top box technology of NxtWave Communication Company.

In July, ATi's new FIREGL X 1 helped DCC and CAD workstations enter a new era. ATi has the world's most advanced workstation graphics card and OpenGL, Microsoft DirectX 9.0 and Linux graphics solutions.

ATi released RADEON 9700, RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 Pro.

In August, ATi released the mobile RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9700 PRO.

In September, ATi released new versions of Universal 9700 PRO and Mobile FIREGL 9000.

In June+10, 5438, ATi showed the world's first graphics card with DDR-2 technology.

165438+ 10 ATi's RADEON 9700 PRO won the 2002 PC Magazine Technology Excellence Award.

ATi released a new generation of handheld multimedia chip IMAGEON 3200.

In March 2003, ATi released RADEON 9800, RADEON 9600, RADEON 9200 and MOBILITY RADEON 9600 series.

On July 24th, 2006, ATi was acquired by AMD for $5.4 billion.

In June 2007, ATi released the first graphics card HD 2900XT, which supported DX 10 and used 5 12 bits of memory, making it the largest graphics card at that time. The video memory bandwidth exceeded 128.5GB/s, which was the largest video card at that time. At the same time, it has 320 superscalar stream processors, which is the graphics card with the largest number of single stream processors. The core integrated 700 million transistors, which was the largest number of integrated transistors at that time.

In June 2007, ATi released the first graphics card in the industry-HD 3800 series, which supports DirectX 10. 1 and Shader Model4. 1. At the same time, it is also the industry's first graphics card manufactured by 55nm process.

AMD-ATi changed its naming strategy from HD3000 series. "xx50" represents a lower-level graphics card, and "xx70" represents a higher-level graphics card.

ATi changed its product strategy, and the main force of R&D turned to the mainstream market.

June 5438+October 2008 10, ATi released HD3870X2, which was the industry's first single card dual-core graphics card solution and became the king of single card performance at that time.

In the first half of the year, ATi released the mobile radium HD3800 series graphics cards, which showed AMD-ATi's determination to bring mainstream graphics cards into the mobile market.

In June, ATi released HD4800 series graphics cards based on RV770 kernel, with 800 superscalar stream processors, which became the graphics card with the largest number of single stream processors at that time, and integrated 956 million transistors. Among them, 4870 is the first graphics card in the industry that uses GDDR5 video memory. HD4870 has the industry's first floating-point computing ability of 1.2TFlops, and the excellent cost performance of HD4800 series is even out of stock in some countries.

12 In August, ATi released 4870X2 and 4850X2, which is the second time AMD-ATi released a single card dual-core solution. Release the second generation energy-saving technology PowerPlay2.0

Edit this story of ATi acquisition

ATI and nVIDIA, another major graphics card manufacturer, have been fighting fiercely for the market, which has accelerated the development of graphics cards. A card and N card occupy more than 95% of the independent graphics card market, and high-performance graphics cards emerge one after another. With strong hardware support, game developers are not idle. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, DirectX9 games appeared in large numbers, and 3DMark of FutureMark Company became the favorite test software for gamers. During this period, the radium series of card A entered the X series, such as radium X800XL, radium X 1950 XTX, etc.

At the same time, NVIDIA's graphics cards have entered GF6 and GF7 series, and the competition between D9.0C..a A card and N card has entered a white-hot situation. The competition between X700 series A card and 6600 series N card is more representative. No matter in terms of price, scale and performance, it is comparable.

In 2006, Ati's weakness compared with NV gradually appeared: ATi only had graphics cards, which led to their products (especially notebook series) relying on other people's faces. NV is also an excellent motherboard chip manufacturer, and its own motherboard matches its own graphics card, making their products more marketable. Similar are Intel and AMD. Intel owns CPU, motherboard and integrated card at the same time, which leads to huge market space for Intel, especially brand computers and notebook computers. Although P4' s NetBrust architecture is essentially a failure, AMD has made great progress, but it has gradually fallen into a passive position when P4 has been criticized and PD has not been released. As a result, a great event happened in PC history-double A went to union.

Since June, there have been endless rumors about AMD's acquisition of ATI. At 8 am on July 24th, 2006, AMD official website issued an official statement confirming the acquisition of ATI. This is the biggest acquisition in the IT industry in recent years, and the whole market structure will change for it. As soon as this statement came out, it immediately became the focus of the industry, and news from all sides poured in. ...

Hector ruiz, Chairman and CEO of AMD, said: ATI officially joined the AMD family, and today is a historic day. We will fully integrate a series of complementary technologies, continue to be committed to innovation, and strive to provide the best product choices for the industry.

AMD plans to build a new x86 processor family, which integrates central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processor (GPU) at the chip level. The development code of this product is "Fusion".

It is reported that the Fusion processor will be launched in late 2008 or early 2009, and will be applied to all computing fields in the future, including desktop, notebook, workstation and other solutions.

The acquisition had an impact on both companies-Intel released a large number of PD and Core series to quickly seize the market, while AMD had to meet Athlon 3000+ with single core first. NVIDIA released the first D 10 graphics card, but the release of Ati's first D 10 graphics card had to be postponed.

The arrival of DirectX 10 era

DX 10(DirectX 10)

A new technology adopted by graphics card can render better colors, make the picture smooth and the game performance better.

In DirectX 10 graphics pipeline system, the biggest structural change is the addition of geometry shader in geometry processing stage. The geometric rendering unit is attached to the vertex rendering unit, but it does not output every vertex like the vertex rendering unit, but takes pixels as the processing object. A primitive is one level higher than a vertex in the hierarchy and consists of one or more vertices. A primitive composed of a single vertex is called a point, a primitive composed of two vertices is called a line, and a primitive composed of three vertices is called a triangle. The geometric rendering unit supports various primitive types, such as points, lines, triangles, lines with adjacent points, triangles with adjacent points, and so on. It can handle up to six vertices at a time. With rich primitive type support, the geometric rendering unit can let GPU provide more detailed model details.

R600 is emerging -HD 2900XT

Finally, in mid-2006, AMD-ATI released the first graphics card supporting DX 10 and SM4.0-ATI radeon HD 2900XT. HD2900XT is based on R600 core and 80 nm manufacturing technology. It has a variety of ultra-luxury hardware configurations, which shows that AMD-ATi has devoted a lot of efforts to this after the acquisition. It has 720 million transistors, 320 superscalar processors, 565,438+02 bits of memory, and the maximum memory bandwidth exceeds128.5 GB/s/s. It fully supports DX 10, SM4.0, AvivoHD video hardware accelerator and other components. In many game performance tests, the HD2900 lost to the competitor NVIDIA's 8800 series based on the G80 core.

The main reasons are as follows:

1, ATi chose superscalar stream processor (hereinafter referred to as SP) for DX 10 support. This is helpful to deal with a large number of parallel data, but superscalar SP needs a group of five to play its full role. NVIDIA chose vector SP, 1 can give full play to its role. In this way, the truly comparable SP number is HD 2900 XT 64 (X5); 8800Ultra/GTX 128，8800GTS(640MB) 1 18，8800GTS(320MB)96。 This comparison shows that HD2900 can't beat 8800 series even with God's help. This is true for the entire HD2000 series, with 24(X5) for the 2600 series and 8(X5) for the 2400 series.

2.ATi does not support asynchronous core frequency, that is, the core frequency must be the same as the SP frequency, while nVIDIA's SP frequency k can easily exceed 1GHz, which shows that ATi's HD2000 series can't compete with peers at all.

3.ATi didn't play its core function correctly. The core of R600 is the ring bus architecture, which is characterized by high data reading speed and low data hit rate. This feature determines that HD2900 needs high-speed memory, not high-bandwidth memory. HD2900 uses 5 12-bitGDDR3 as the main memory, just like a person with poor eyesight and great strength looking for something on a wide floor, with great resistance. The 1GB version of HD2900XT is dragged down by the long delay of GDDR4 video memory itself.

4. The algorithm of 4.HD2000 series is not mature enough, and there are many bugs. After AA (anti-aliasing) is turned on, the performance drops obviously.

Nevertheless, the HD2000 series has not been left behind by the G8000 series, which shows that the efficiency of the HD2000 series is still relatively high.

Fortunately, AvivoHD hard decoding technology attached to HD2000 is much better than G8000 series. In contrast, HD2000 is still competitive.

R600 is maturing -HD 3800 series

At the end of June 2007, AMD-ATi released HD3800 series graphics cards. She is the first graphics card manufactured by 55nm process in the industry, and also the first graphics card supporting DirectX 10. 1 and Shader Model4. 1. Based on RV670 kernel, most features of R600 kernel are retained. It also has 320 superscalar SP, and the number of transistors is reduced to 666 million. She introduced ATi's new technologies, such as PowerPlay energy-saving technology and AvivoHD second-generation hard decoding technology. AMD-ATi did not use 5 12 bit memory on HD3800 this time, but only used 256 bit GDDR3 memory. It can be seen that AMD-ATi has found the memory policy error on HD2900.

AMD-ATi changed its naming strategy. "xx50" stands for lower-level graphics card, and "xx70" stands for higher-level graphics card, discarding ambiguous suffixes such as GT, PRO, XT and XTX.

AMD-ATi has since adjusted its marketing strategy, and the main force of R&D has turned to the mainstream market to save costs, thus attracting manufacturers to open up sales channels and attracting consumers to buy products. Among them, HD3850, with its precise positioning, has filled the huge positioning vacancy in NVIDIA and achieved certain success. However, this does not mean that AMD-ATi will lose its flagship market. AMD-ATi will launch a flagship card, integrating a single card with two chips to save costs. AMD-ATi's marketing strategy began to take the lead. HD3870X2, released in June 5438+October 20081October, is the industry's first single-card dual-core graphics card solution, which beat the previous strongest single-card GeForce8800Ultra and became the king of single-card performance at that time.

The performance of HD3800 series is stable, there is no big problem in use, and R600 has also begun to mature.

The Peak of R600-HD 4800 Series

In June 2008, AMD-ATi experienced more than a year's efforts and finally broke out! The radium HD4800 series based on RV770 kernel has finally been released! HD4850, the first to be listed, has the floating-point computing power of1t (1kloc-0/2) flops, which easily beats GeForce9800GTX in the high-end market, even though nVIDIA released high-frequency 9800GTX+. RV770 can be said to be a comprehensive upgraded version of RV670. After the manufacturing process is mature, the 320 superscalar SP is increased to 800 superscalar SP, and the grating and texture unit are also increased. AMD-ATi uses the optimized AA algorithm on HD4800 series, which can completely beat G9800 series graphics cards after opening AA. AMD-ATi used the correct video memory strategy on the upcoming HD4870, and introduced a 256-bit GDDR5 video memory with a main frequency of 3.6GHz! This gives full play to the advantages and characteristics of the bus structure around the city, just like people with poor eyesight and great strength running quickly to find things on the smooth floor only one person wide, as long as they pay attention to their feet, they don't need to look around, which improves efficiency. The performance of HD4870 is higher, with the industry's first floating-point computing ability of 1.2TFlops, and the game performance can even be comparable to that of GTX260.

The radium HD 4800 series performed well. As soon as HD4850 went on the market, the price of 1499 yuan forced nVIDIA to reduce GeForce9800GTX from 2999 yuan to 1999 yuan, and it reached 1399 yuan in a few days, which shows its influence. HD4800 series has outstanding cost performance, and is sought after by graphics card enthusiasts. It sells well in all countries and even runs out of stock in some countries.

12 In August, AMD-ATi released HD4870X2 and HD 4850X2. The 4870X2 mainly faces the flagship market and confronts the most advanced monster graphics card GTX280. HD4850X2 encourages the main promotion of non-public products, saves costs, reduces prices and occupies high-end markets. On the same day, AMD-ATi released the driver CatalystControlCenter8.8, which will greatly improve the performance of single-card dual-core and dual-card interconnection solutions; At the same time, the new generation of energy-saving technology of PowerPlay2.0 will further enhance the competitiveness of AMD-ATi products.

The contest between A card and N card has been going on.

Off-topic: The graphics card I use is sapphire 1950GT5 12MB from a factory. Good point ~ ~ Hehe ~ ~