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AMD's ATI Claims Lead with Dual-Chip Graphics Card
By Richard Koman

January 28, 2008 10:00AM

ATI's success may have a halo effect for AMD as a whole, said Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies. AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 with two processors is aimed at the gaming world and is the first graphics chipset to support Microsoft's DirectX 10.1 specification for Windows Vista.

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AMD

announced Monday that it has put two processors on a single graphics board, a development it says leapfrogs technology from Nvidia, its chief competitor in the graphics space.

The new ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 combines two Radeon HD 3870 processors connected by the company's CrossFire technology, delivering more than a teraflop -- one trillion floating-point operations per second -- of performance. The X2 also breaks a price barrier at $449 -- significantly less than Nvidia's GeForce 8800 Ultra, which costs as much as $699.

AMD entered the graphics-processing market in 2006 with its purchase of ATI for $5.4 billion.

'Kick-Ass Card'

The X2 "sets the standard by which all should be compared in this segment" in terms of performance and scalability, said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's graphics product group. He called it "the new gold standard of the PC gaming world."

The X2 uses a 55-nanometer process, which delivers a twofold increase in performance per watt over previous versions, the company said.

"It's a kick-ass card," agreed Roger Kay, president of market intelligence firm Endpoint Technologies. "It probably gives them high-end bragging rights," he added in a telephone interview. While Nvidia still has a commanding lead in sales volume, "it's important for the whole company for ATI to take the performance crown -- at least temporarily."

Competition Good for Consumers

Kay said that in his 10 years of watching this sector, he's seen ATI and Nvidia trade places at least three times. Nvidia has stumbled with "a lot of driver issues" related to the release of Windows Vista, he said, while "ATI has managed to execute reasonably well."

While this is "ATI's moment from a performance perspective," the good news for consumers is that the two are "nearly equal competitors vying for dominance. That's the best kind of choice for buyers, hardware OEMs as well as end users," he said.

The X2 is a "stake in the ground for now for Nvidia to show what it can do," Kay added.

AMD said the X2 is the first graphics chipset to support Microsoft 's DirectX 10.1 specification, a series of application programming interfaces for game programming and video. DirectX 10 is compatible only with Windows Vista. Microsoft unveiled a preview version of DirectX 10.1 in December. (continued...)

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