Interview with ATI's Dave Orton November 26, 2003 Chris Angelini

Introduction

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ATI’s position in the graphics market has shifted heavily in the past year. The company was once notorious for releasing new hardware, only to be one-upped by a competing card from NVIDIA, or in other instances, a mere driver update. At one time, the gaming community actually shunned ATI cards in favor of faster and more robust competing solutions from NVIDIA.

Of course, a lot has changed since then. ATI turned over a new leaf after it acquired ArtX, the brains behind GameCube’s “Flipper” chip and the original R300 core. Shortly after that acquisition, I had the opportunity to interview Dave Orton, former president and CEO of ArtX and current president and COO of ATI technologies, for a story on which I was working.

Back then in 2000, everyone was under the impression that ArtX would take ATI into the e-appliance market and augment the firm’s portfolio with an integrated graphics chipset. There was no talk of R300 or acceptance with gaming enthusiasts. In fact, the interview centered on how the two freshly conjoined companies would mutually benefit each other.

R300’s debut two years later was a bombshell, to say the least. And I’ll never forget leaving the Ruby Skye nightclub in San Francisco the night ATI concluded its press briefing. I ran across an ArtX engineer who was clearly excited about the proceedings at hand. After talking about R300 for ten minutes, he leaned over and with a smirk said, “You think this stuff’s cool? You should see what I’m working on right now!”

Since then, I’ve wondered about the “stuff” he referred. ATI apparently isn’t done speaking its peace about the way it thinks games were meant to be played.

That’s just one reason I was so thrilled to get another opportunity to talk with Dave Orton a couple of weeks ago. Most of the questions this time around are pretty general since Dave’s job is further from engineering than it once was. However, we also have a technical interview planned that should address some of the points that were raised in our interview with NVIDIA’s David Kirk. Stay tuned for that one!



SIDEBAR: ATI announced its acquisition of ArtX on February 16, 2000. Yes, it really has been that long.

K8, PCI Express, and the old IXP

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FiringSquad: In previous conversations with representatives from ATI, it has been indicated that we’ll see an Athlon 64 chipset. With the architecture’s memory controller integrated into the processor, it seems extremely hard to differentiate one core logic product from another with the exception of feature set. What do you think that ATI can do to set itself apart in the high-end K8 chipset market?

Dave: Even though K8 features an integrated memory controller, the architecture creates a different set of opportunities to differentiate. We are committed to developing K8 core logic, though it probably won’t be in the next six months. However, we will be working on both desktop and notebook chipsets.

FiringSquad: From conversations I’ve had with major OEMs, it sounds like ATI has a jump on the development of PCI Express graphics adapters. Will this speed the development of your next-generation core logic?

Dave: PCI Express is a standard, much like PCI or AGP, to which all manufacturers have access. With that said, we’ll have both discrete and integrated versions of our next generation Pentium 4 chipset that use PCI Express, which OEMs like because it provides them flexibility.

Interjection by Chris Evenden, ATI’s director of public relations: ATI was first to demo a PCI-Express graphics card (at Fall IDF, Sept 16). As far as we know, NV hasn’t got silicon yet. All the major OEMs have our silicon to experiment with, and to help them bring up their own PCI-E systems. We’ll be ready with a full top-to-bottom range of native PCI-E (that is, we won’t use a bridge chip) for Intel’s launch (likely to be early June, but Intel’s launches are “real” launches, with products in retail, so we’ll be in full production before then).

FiringSquad: One criticism I’ve heard repeatedly in regards to the IGP 9100 concerns its somewhat dated IXP 250 south bridge. Is there anything being done to augment the south bridge architecture of your premier P4 chipset?

Dave: Of course, we have a south bridge roadmap with improvements planned. RS300 is highly anticipated, but we’ve encountered some delays getting our USB 2.0 qualification, which is why the chipset is only now seeing availability. We’ve learned a lot about what it means to operate full-time in the chipset market. Several motherboard manufacturers will be integrating Gigabit Ethernet chips onto their RS300 board, but we don’t have any plans to incorporate Gigabit functionality, at least in the short-term.



SIDEBAR: Along with the expertise of Dave Orton, ATI also augmented its Board of Directors with Dr. Wei Yen, ArtX’s co-founder and a former VP at Silicon Graphics.

Progress, Longhorn, and Market Share

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FiringSquad: You’ve successfully leveraged the R300 architecture, which was announced more than one year ago, into three subsequent flagship products (RADEON 9700 PRO, 9800 PRO, and 9800 XT). At one point, it looked like the development of graphics architecture would continue accelerating. However, do you feel that the current trend of stretching a single architecture over a long useful life is the most economical approach?

Dave: There are, of course, many drivers for architectural innovation. One of the most important is the pace at which DirectX and other APIs are developed. The other main one is technology, by which I mean process and manufacturing. With R300, we created an architecture that serves DirectX 9 really well. DirectX 9 will be the predominant API until DirectX 10 emerges, and with R300, we created an architecture that serves the API really well. If you look at the step up from DirectX 8 to DirectX 9, that was a huge inflection point. As the industry evolves to DirectX 10, there will be more opportunities to optimize for whatever features accompany the API.

FiringSquad: What role is Longhorn’s feature set playing in the development of the hardware we’ll be seeing in 2005?

Dave: DirectX 10 and Longhorn look to be aligned fairly well with regard to timing. The most pressing issue we see is the operating system demands on our IGP parts, which will all need to comply with the updated platform expectations. Of course, when the operating system debuts, we’ll offer pervasive top to bottom support.

FiringSquad: What effect have you seen the lack of a low-end DirectX 9 board play upon sales? I realize that a mainstream card like the GeForce FX 5200 isn’t entirely capable of plowing through DirectX 9 games, but it does boast that one feature lacking from ATI’s competing part. How does the RADEON 9600 SE come into play?

Dave: Yes, DirectX 9 support has been a check-box feature at the low-end. We’re happy with the 9200’s performance, though, relative to NV34, and the fact that we can do more performance-wise. Our 9600 SE, with real DirectX 9 performance, is coming in at very competitive prices and it does a lot to compliment the 9200. Stay tuned for more in that particular market.

FiringSquad: According to a recent release by Mercury Research, ATI is picking up market share this quarter. From where do you see that market share coming from, and from which markets do you feel ATI still has significant room to grow?

Dave: Mercury is an “in retrospect” sort of thing, and now we’re in November. It is, however, a good representation of the past quarter or so. Those numbers reflect our gain in the desktop market. If you look at the discrete side of things, we gained additional ground while NVIDIA lost some.



SIDEBAR: ATI bought ArtX for $400 million in common stock in options.

Moving forward and Conclusion

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FiringSquad: ATI has announced agreements with both Microsoft and Nintendo. Are two separate development teams tackling these projects, and if so, do you anticipate spreading yourself a little too thin?

Dave: We haven’t yet announced what we’re working on for either Microsoft or Nintendo. However, when you move into a new business, you need to establish an advantage. We’re looking at the console market as an opportunity to help drive the 3D experience. We have both East and West coast development teams that are able to work on different projects. It has actually created even more focus.

FiringSquad: There are currently three memory technologies on the table: DDR, DDR-2, and GDDR-3. Is GDDR-3 ready for prime time yet or we see ATI persist with vanilla DDR memory for a while?

Dave: We’ll continue to use a mix of DDR and DDR-2 memory technologies in the immediate future. GDDR-3 is still a ways out, but we are in a position to move forward with the technology as soon as the memory vendors are. We are certainly looking forward.

FiringSquad: TSMC’s .15-micron manufacturing process has served you well for quite a while now. That said, you’ve made a relatively smooth transition to .13 at the mainstream level. How soon will we see all production move to .13? Is UMC currently manufacturing any .13 parts for ATI?

Dave: We’ve had a lot of success with both .15 and .13. We’re continuing to use the technology that makes sense. Currently we don’t have any .13-micron product coming from UMC.

FiringSquad: I’d like to personally thank Mr. Orton for taking a few minutes from his schedule to share his insight. Moving forward, I’m anxiously awaiting whatever the “stuff” was that the ArtX employee seemed so excited about more than a year ago. Based on the timing of R300, I have a feeling that 2004 will be another exciting year over at ATI.



SIDEBAR: Is ATI primed for another big year in 2004 or do you think it will be NVIDIA’s year? What about the Gamecube and Xbox follow-up products? Chat about these topics and more in the news comments!