ATI talks up Crossfire futures

WE HAD a chance to speak with Godfrey Cheng, a director of marketing, platform technologies at ATI, as we wanted to learn more about the future diretion of Crossfire.

We asked this nice chap about his firm's plans for multiple Crossfire, whether the master card would linger long and how Avivo is shaping up.

He was also happy to reply to questions about ATI's plans for its future relationship with Intel.

Godfrey said that both AMD and ATI have always shared the philosophy of Open mArchitecture. He confirmed that ATI intends to continue supporting Intel chipsets with both single and multi-GPU products. ATI wants to be the fastest choice for both AMD and Intel platforms, he said.

He sees Crossfire as the ultimate gaming platform based on ATI's GPUs. The technology will eventually evolve to a new level of physics and he thinks it will be much more flexible for users. There will be some cool announcements about this one shortly, we learned.

The X1600 series cards and some future implementations won't need a master card. The-soon-to-be-announced R580+ will still need a master card, but the next-generation card, scheduled for later this year, won't need the extra card anymore, nor the unpopular dongle.

He also added that ATI really focuses on Avivo and the video related marchitectures. The PC group can just go visit the video division and pick up some cool marchitecture and implement this in their graphics chips.

Video and related features are part of ATI's DNA, he claimed. ATI has been doing video in hardware since the early nineties and its engineers are well-versed in the subject. It's not embarking on some half-baked marketing campaign. There is much meat behind the sizzle, he suggested.

The future of Avivo will be outlined in the marketing tour codenamed "Avivo Dalmation Tour" in which ATI plans to reveal spiffing new video offerings. µ