As we go through each architectural change we begin to see that an increasing number of chips are being produced by the IHV’s – first only one ASIC was produced to meet the entire market, then two, and last year it was three. Does ATI have the engineering resources to produce that many parts in a timely manner?
Well, I think four is needed now.
What’s interesting is that you could argue there are more offerings down below, but that’s not the case. We used to design to a 10x10 die, then a 12x12 and then the R300 was 14x14 and now we’re at 16x16, so you see what’s really happened is we’ve added more SKU’s in the high end as time has gone by, so if you’re at 16x16, what’s the next one down?
We think that there still is a market for a $10 part. Integrated isn’t taking over the world, so there’s a huge opportunity for discrete parts out there for about a $10-$12 selling price. So, with that at the bottom end and you’re high end part you ask if one will fill the gap, and the answer is probably not, you might need two. So, how you implement those total 4 SKU’s is the question – is it 3 design centres and some migrant technology or is it 4 design centres?
However, as you’ll see this fall from us, and our RV lines, a total of 4 parts too. But the key is, from an architectural level, if you architect it properly it becomes more of a system level design question, and that’s what we’re looking to do.
Just after the introduction of R300 you talked about R400, however shortly afterwards that appeared to go off the roadmap and R420 appeared – what happened during that period? And would that be related to upcoming contracts with console vendors?
We changed the roadmap.
You can look at cause and effect. That was not the cause, internal changes was the cause and the outcome was that we decided the best way to go forward was to do “this” with the PC roadmap and take “that” and use it with X-Box. But that wasn’t the cause of the roadmap change, we had to make this change anyhow due to execution issues.
We' like to thank Dave for his frank and detailed answers to our questions. you can see that it he has highlighted a number of changes in ATI's engineering structure over the past year or so and it should be interesting to watch their development and execution over their coming architectures.
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