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ATI's engineers have worked hard this past year.
At the risk of being redundant, they've escorted to market
the R300 series of Visual Processing Units (VPUs), they've
spun off mainstream versions of the same chip for broader
appeal, and they've successfully implemented the R300 and
R350 processors (operating at full-speed) into the All-In-Wonder family of multimedia products. What a busy
bunch of beavers. But there are other aspects of
computing in which the expertise of a graphics company
proves useful. ATI's rival, NVIDIA, already knows
that. NVIDIA's nForce and nForce2 chipsets have
delivered above-average platform performance, and to those
who don't mind the limited power of an integrated graphics
core, acceptable 3D processing as well. That is, it
has done so for owners of AMD's Athlon XP processor.
NVIDIA can't seem to get its hands on a Pentium 4 bus
license, which would be the first step in competing with
Intel's immensely successful chipset lineup. ATI, on
the other hand, does have the necessary relationship with
Intel to manufacture Pentium 4-compliant core logic
chipset.
And while ATI
hasn't put the finishing touches on its brand new RADEON
9100 IGP quite yet, we've been offered a peek into what
the platform will offer when it becomes available a little
later this year. When it arrives, ATI will position
the chipset as a desktop solution and as a mobile
product. In fact, Phil Eisler, VP and General
Manager of ATI's integrated and mobile business unit,
expects the RADEON 9100 IGP to predominantly surface in pre-built
consumer PCs, though manufacturers such as ASUS, MSI, and
Gigabyte are already lined up to deliver motherboards
powered by the chipset.
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Specifications of ATI's desktop RADEON 9100 IGP |
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ATI Jumps on the
Dual-Channel DDR Bus |
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Reuven Soraya, Director
of Marketing and Phil Eisler, VP and General Manager
(Mobile Business Unit)
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CPU:
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Supports
Intel Pentium 4 Socket 478 processors with
533/400MHz front side bus
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Supports
Hyper-Threading technology
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In-order
Queue depth of 12
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Supports
Dynamic Bus Inversion (DBI)
Chipset:
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AGP 3.0
compliant interface with Fast Write support
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266MB/s
point-to-point interface to ATI IXP in A-link mode
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Unified
Memory Architecture (for graphics memory)
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Memory:
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Dual
channel, 128-bit DDR SDRAM memory interface
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Support
for up to DDR400 SDRAM (up to 6.4GB per second of
bandwidth)
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Up to
4GB SDRAM
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Between
16 and 128MB of main memory configurable as display
memory
2D
Graphics Features:
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Optimized 128-bit 2D engine
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Hardware
cursor up to 64x64x32
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Supports
a maximum resolution of 2048x1536x32
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Support
for Windows XP alpha cursor
USB
2.0:
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6 USB
2.0 ports
IDE:
LAN:
3D
Graphics Features
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HyperZ
memory optimization
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Hardware
acceleration with Pixel Shader 1.4 support
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Supports
up to 2048x1536x32
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Supports
3D textures and Microsoft DXTC
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Anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing
Video
Features:
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Video
scaling and filtering with 4-tap horizontal and
vertical filter
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Integrated hardware motion compensation and iDCT
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Enhanced
MPEG-2 hardware decode
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Hardware
DVD sub-picture decode
Display Controller:
Other
Features: | |
Inside the RADEON 9100 IGP
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