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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DiViT who wrote (35546)	8/27/1998 2:17:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

I agree with you. $30 for a chip that does graphics, 3D, and DVD. Even in the PC-DVD ugrade market, "I'll take a free 3D graphics upgrade with my DVD-ROM upgrade -- thank you very much."

To: DiViT who wrote (35546)	8/27/1998 2:23:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Oh, did I forget to mention HDTV support? eet.com Graphics for PC are all the rage By Margaret Quan TORONTO - Graphics-accelerator chip maker ATI Technologies aims to grab a share of the PC workstation market with two devices that improve 2-D and 3-D rendering, and integrate a DVD encoder and HDTV support. These additions to ATI's Rage family of graphics accelerators offer a fivefold step up in performance from the Rage Pro, introduced a year ago, according to the company. The Rage 128 GL and Rage 128 VR incorporate four new technologies, said Niles Burbank, a product manager in ATI's component marketing division: superscalar rendering, single-pass multitexturing, twin-cache architecture and a concurrent command engine. With a 128-bit memory interface, the Rage 128 GL is designed for high-end PCs and add-in cards, and PC workstations. The Rage 128 VR has most of the same features except for a 64-bit memory interface and small package size. It is aimed at midrange OEM motherboard implementations. "As a side effect of trying to stay ahead in the mainstream PC graphics market, we're approaching 3-D performance levels close to that of traditional 3-D workstation vendors," said Burbank. He said the company hopes to convince at least two of the top vendors in the fast-growing PC workstation segment to use its architecture. ATI's superscalar rendering engine technology uses a dual-rendering pipe to process multiple pixels per clock cycle. The texturing capability is 1 gigatexel/second (a texel is a pixel of a texture map). Single-pass multitexturing enables special effects such as shadows and lighting without frame-rate loss. The twin-cache architecture enables caching of texels and pixels and improves memory performance. In addition, the concurrent-command engine gives the chip the ability to fetch command and vertex information out of the main memory without driver intervention. This decouples the processor from the graphics controller for peak efficiency, ATI claimed. The Rage128 GL is sampling now and will ship in September. Pricing is $40 for 10,000-unit quantities. ATI is also offering three graphics-accelerator boards with the chip: Fury, a 32-Mbyte board for the videogame market; Magnum, a 32-Mbyte board for PC workstations; and Expert128, a 16-Mbyte board for mainstream PCs. Rage 128 VR packs 16 Mbytes of graphics memory and is available in a 256-pin ball-grid array. Sampling in September, it will run $30 in lots of 10,000. Burbank said ATI is positioning the chips for multimedia PCs and the fast-growing market for Pentium II and Xeon-based workstations running Windows NT. Burbank noted that since introducing 3-D graphics chips three years ago, ATI has boosted performance at a faster pace than traditional workstation chip vendors. ATI also has products for the mobile market, the Rage LT Pro chip, and has been chosen to supply graphics chips for General Instruments' digital set-top boxes.

To: DiViT who wrote (35546)	8/27/1998 6:01:00 PM
From: Taro	Respond to of 50808

Hi David, my elbow(!) tells me that ZRAN was in, lost it to CUBE and then recently got in again... Good question, from whom comes the alleged on-chip MPEG-2 technology? From iCompression?? Taro

To: DiViT who wrote (35546)	8/28/1998 2:31:00 AM
From: stak	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

>>IF ATI has a full decoder built in to this new chip, it's my opinion that Cube cannot compete with it in the PC-DVD space.<< david, devastating answer! i'm looking forward to more of your comments on this situation.

To: DiViT who wrote (35546)	8/28/1998 8:55:00 AM
From: William T. Katz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

David, the achilles heel of ATI is the chip's 3D ability. There are other chips out there that might be much better gaming and 3D solutions than the ATI part ... we'll have to see some benchmarks before we can tell. However, if 3dfx's Banshee or nVidia's TNT do well in the market place (and both seem to be locking in decent design wins), hardware DVD from CUBE is still needed through the VIP. The ATI design, though, does obviate CUBE chip from any design wins ATI gets. But remember, CUBE is now a digital video networking company :)