AMD broadens Xenos design investment down as well as up
Tuesday 13th February 2007, 12:12:00 PM, written by Geo
Way back in the spring of 2005, Dave Orton noted that it would be a
year of investment for his company (then known as ATI), while 2006
would be the year of benefiting from that investment. At the time,
observers took him to mean that the considerable effort that went into
designing Xenos would not be a "one off", but would instead continue to be the gift that keeps on giving. Later, in 2006, AMD confirmed that indeed Xenos would provide a significant part of the technology base for their new R600 GPU.
Well, the calendar has turned from 2006 to 2007, so presumably some things are a bit later than Orton would have liked them. However, yesterday comes news from AMD that the Xenos investment has not yet finished paying off. This time it's going down the size/power foodchain to the handheld market, having been licensed to STMicroelectronics to be integrated into their Nomadik platform. This confirms speculation from one of our own forum threads from late 2005 where it was both speculated that a "cut down Xenos" was being prepared for the handheld market, and that Xenos architect Bob Feldstein had moved to the handheld division to oversee the effort.
Of course, the bean counters at AMD will no doubt appreciate leveraging investments already made. More interesting, however, is the potentially important things this implies in general for unified architectures in small/cheap/low power applications. With Imagination Technologies own SGX also being a unified shading part, and apparently appreciated by Intel, this gives three major players who by their actions are implying that unified parts are particularly well suited for handhelds, mobile, and presumably low-end discrete as well.
Well, the calendar has turned from 2006 to 2007, so presumably some things are a bit later than Orton would have liked them. However, yesterday comes news from AMD that the Xenos investment has not yet finished paying off. This time it's going down the size/power foodchain to the handheld market, having been licensed to STMicroelectronics to be integrated into their Nomadik platform. This confirms speculation from one of our own forum threads from late 2005 where it was both speculated that a "cut down Xenos" was being prepared for the handheld market, and that Xenos architect Bob Feldstein had moved to the handheld division to oversee the effort.
Of course, the bean counters at AMD will no doubt appreciate leveraging investments already made. More interesting, however, is the potentially important things this implies in general for unified architectures in small/cheap/low power applications. With Imagination Technologies own SGX also being a unified shading part, and apparently appreciated by Intel, this gives three major players who by their actions are implying that unified parts are particularly well suited for handhelds, mobile, and presumably low-end discrete as well.
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