Fish and chips, wrapped up
ATI Cordon Bleu - Fish and chips
HEXUS: OK, we have to ask. Bullhead, Grouper and Halibut, the reference designs you guys have produced recently, they're all fish? Why the codenames?John: *laughs* So you know team-building days out of the office doing cool stuff, like paintball or something?
HEXUS: *laughs* Yeah....
John: Well the board team that put together stuff like Grouper, instead of paintballing or something like that, they all go fishing. They're all crazy avid fishermen. That's why you've got the codenames.
HEXUS: Yeah, and we see fish silkscreened on the board PCBs from time to time *laughs*
John: Haha, right! All that stuff, that's not my chip team, that's the crazy board team that create our reference designs. Blame it on them!
HEXUS: Good old fish and chips!
John: Aahaha!
When to expect Grouper, wrapping it all up
HEXUS: So we'll see RS480 and RS482 boards out there soon, including the Grouper enthusiast boards with high Vdimm and the overclocking tweaks for high speed running?John: Right. I think you guys know the Crossfire timetable, so we're shooting to get in there with that.
HEXUS: [Editor's Note:] Rick Bergman recently said September[/Editor's Note] OK, so the next month or so and the boards will be out there to buy?
John: All going well!
HEXUS: Cool, thanks for your time John, glad we finally bumped into each other, was good talking to you. Let us know we can let the secret, err, fish out of the, umm, net.
John: *laughs* Will do, and no problems, thanks for having a chat. Cheers!
Summary
John and I talked about some upcoming stuff you'll see in due course that'll follow on from the groundwork they're hoping to lay with Grouper and that reference platform, a platform which includes Crossfire support with Crossfire Edition mainboards based on that design. The main thing I took from our chat was his enthusiasm about the products they want to create for the enthusiast. They want to get the southbridge up to speed and spec in a number of areas and really nail that down, as well as diving in head first with the tweaks and out-of-spec ability they want to engineer into the northbridge and board designs for some really great overclocking.In short, they want to pull people away from nForce4 and move them over to Radeon Xpress, with boards they're proud of that they think we'll like, too. They've had some delays with that which they're aware of, but they're confident they're on the ball again now. John's a hardware enthusiast at heart, as you can see from his attendance at the events I mentioned on the opening page.
He loves his hardware and that's got him wanting to create the best mainboards he can. Some of that seems to be borne out of his own desire to tweak his own stuff as much as possible, and since he and his team design the ASICs and they've got a mad board team to work with on that side, he's getting to deliver his cool hardware out to retail for people to play with.
We'll see how they get on very soon. We've already got Crossfire Edition hardware here at HEXUS, based on the silicon John's team creates, so we can give you the definitive low-down on how well they're doing in due course.
Thanks to Andrzej Bania and Chris Hook at ATI for getting us some phone time with John to chat about ASIC design and the boards coming out soon. Cheers chaps!
HEXUS.cheat-sheet
There was some technical stuff in there that you might not be familiar with, so here's a cheat-sheet of notes and references that might help you, if you want to go on and have a further look at some of the stuff we talked about.Verilog is a hardware description language with a fairly easy to use programming syntax that lets you design hardware logic. Everything from comparison logic to do the most basic of operations, via adders, barrel shifters and other computation logic, right through to advanced designs to, say, combine floating point render targets on a GPU, or composite integer framebuffers for something like Crossfire. ATI use Verilog to design their ASICs.
FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays, are chips that let you take prototype designs from the simulator, that you've designed in something like Verilog, and run it without having to order a batch of silicon that may or may not work, from a foundry partner. For a fab-less semiconductor company like ATI, bringing up designs in hardware using FPGAs is vital to perfect a design, even though it runs at very low speed, to make sure it works correctly before tape-out and ordering production silicon wafers in large numbers from someone like TSMC.
The FGPA can then be taken by someone like Actel or Xylinx and made into a 'hard' FPGA where the gates are fixed and the chip can be clocked a fair bit higher, which is relatively cheap and can be done on a case by case basis. ATI may use the fixed 'hard' FPGAs for speed-specific tests that need a higher clock, but without the high cost of a full silicon order. Those orders, or spins, can be very costly, in the order of millions of dollars.
