Xbox 2 chipset being done at ATI-Marlborough, so is R500...hmmmm

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EE Times
August 15, 2003 (2:14 p.m. ET)

ATI (Markham, Ontario) announced the deal Thursday (Aug. 14), which
has been in negotiations for more than a year. The company will design
a semicustom graphics chip, primarily in its Marlborough, Mass.,
design center for the video game console and charge Microsoft for
upfront engineering and per-unit royalties, said Rick Bergman, vice
president of marketing for ATI.

For ATI's archrival, Nvidia Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) which supplies
graphics chips for the current Xbox on a product basis, the deal
represents a loss of up to $350 million in 2005, according to one
senior financial analyst. In one recent quarterly report, Nvidia said
the Xbox represented nearly 20 percent of its sales.


Bergman would not comment on the graphics technology for the
next-generation Xbox. However, the company's Marlborough office is
known to be working on ATI's so-called R500 core, the successor to the
R400 core now being designed in ATI's Santa Clara office and planned
for launch in high-end desktop graphics chips this fall. The R500 is
expected to be aimed at the DirectX 10 application programming
interface to be used in Longhorn, the next major version of Windows
expected to be released in 2005.

Bergman did say ATI and Microsoft technical managers quickly agreed on
a graphics specification for the system which has been called Xbox2 or
Xbox Next and that it will require some custom graphics design work.

Joe Osha, a senior analyst with Merrill Lynch, expects ATI will reap
$25 million to $35 million in royalty revenues or about 5 to 8 cents
additional earnings per share in 2005 on the deal, assuming a
Christmas 2005 roll out for the Xbox2. By contrast, Nvidia will lose
$250 to $350 of product revenue or about 8 to 12 cents in earnings per
share in 2005, he estimated.


entire article here: http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20030815S0012
 
EE Times
August 15, 2003 (2:14 p.m. ET)

ATI (Markham, Ontario) announced the deal Thursday (Aug. 14), which
has been in negotiations for more than a year. The company will design
a semicustom graphics chip, primarily in its Marlborough, Mass.,
design center for the video game console and charge Microsoft for
upfront engineering and per-unit royalties, said Rick Bergman, vice
president of marketing for ATI.

For ATI's archrival, Nvidia Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) which supplies
graphics chips for the current Xbox on a product basis, the deal
represents a loss of up to $350 million in 2005, according to one
senior financial analyst. In one recent quarterly report, Nvidia said
the Xbox represented nearly 20 percent of its sales.
Click to expand...

and - 20% of its profits................ ??
Bergman would not comment on the graphics technology for the
next-generation Xbox. However, the company's Marlborough office is
known to be working on ATI's so-called R500 core, the successor to the
R400 core now being designed in ATI's Santa Clara office and planned
for launch in high-end desktop graphics chips this fall. The R500 is
expected to be aimed at the DirectX 10 application programming
interface to be used in Longhorn, the next major version of Windows
expected to be released in 2005.

Bergman did say ATI and Microsoft technical managers quickly agreed on
a graphics specification for the system which has been called Xbox2 or
Xbox Next and that it will require some custom graphics design work.

Joe Osha, a senior analyst with Merrill Lynch, expects ATI will reap
$25 million to $35 million in royalty revenues or about 5 to 8 cents
additional earnings per share in 2005 on the deal, assuming a
Christmas 2005 roll out for the Xbox2. By contrast, Nvidia will lose
$250 to $350 of product revenue or about 8 to 12 cents in earnings per
share in 2005, he estimated
Click to expand...

AFAIK, Joe Osha is shooting from the wrong orifice.

Nvidia has never published the PROFIT breakdown of the MS
deal . nVidia did not aggressively go after the Xbox2 deal
.......... I wonder why..........?

MS and Ati should make good bedfellows, like the black
widow spider and its unfortunate mate........

And if the Xbox2 is not 100% backward and forward-compatible with
Xbox games, MS can look to a confused market-place and steep loss
of total console market-share. Many current Xbox titles, especially
those really pushing the graphics performance are coded a lot closer
to the video and audio hardware than DirectX. Best of luck to Ati in
emulating the Xbox nVidia a/v co-processor. Of course, if the Xbox2
contained both the Xbox nVidia co-processor and the new Ati Xbox2
one, a la PS 2 with PS 1 compatibilty.... ? I am 99.9% certain that
this latter suggestion was not part of the MS.Ati agreement..........

John Lewis
 
Nvidia has never published the PROFIT breakdown of the MS
deal . nVidia did not aggressively go after the Xbox2 deal
......... I wonder why..........?
Click to expand...

-Total crap, read here. One very important reason that nVidia is making
money is XBox.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/chips/0,39020354,39115579,00.htm

And if the Xbox2 is not 100% backward and forward-compatible with
Xbox games, MS can look to a confused market-place and steep loss
of total console market-share. Many current Xbox titles, especially
those really pushing the graphics performance are coded a lot closer
to the video and audio hardware than DirectX. Best of luck to Ati in
Click to expand...

-Nope. All the games use either DirectX (and DirectAudio) or OpenGL, so
there's no problem with compability.
 
-Nope. All the games use either DirectX (and DirectAudio) or OpenGL, so
there's no problem with compability.
Click to expand...

They use DirectX as a basis (OpenGL support for the XBox seems very
hit and miss, with an emphasis on 'miss'), but it is not DirectX
itself. Rather it is an extension to DirectX that is designed
specifically for the Xbox and allows some direct access to the
hardware.

Compatibility WILL BE a problem, but it's not an insurmountable one.
Since the XBox2 will (presumably) have a lot more umph in the
processing department than the XBox, a sort of hardware compatibility
layer can be built in software to take care of the direct hardware
access for existing XBox games. It will probably take a bit of
tweaking, and the odd game here and there probably won't work, but
99%+ of all games should be fine.
 
-Total crap, read here. One very important reason that nVidia is making
money is XBox.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/chips/0,39020354,39115579,00.htm
Click to expand...

Wrong............nVidia's revenue growth was indeed partly
-Nope. All the games use either DirectX (and DirectAudio) or OpenGL, so
there's no problem with compability.
Click to expand...

Wrong again. The backward compatibility problem will be
an immense headache and consume significant resources, unless
the current MS-nVidia deal allows a third-party complete access
to nVidia's Xbox design, including the right to freely use any
patented technology. Even though MS underwrote the $$
for much of the nVidia design, I doubt that the agreement
allows any such free access by a third party.

John Lewis
 
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