Trident prepares to shoot XP4 graphics chip at desktop market

And, although the XP4 was announced as a chip set for laptops, the latest noises from the company suggest it is now bound for proper PCs too.

'Tiling' technology was used by the STMicroelectronics and Videologic (now Pure Digital) partnership in their Kyro and Kyro II chips of last year and the year before and which, in turn, stems from the NEC/Videologic push to develop Power VR. This hook-up managed to miss the biggest boat because it took so long to perfect for the PC. It eventually found a home in the Dreamcast console.

The tiling technique aims to just render those pixels actually used in a scene, saving, its proponents say, memory and bandwidth compared to the established nVidia and ATi architectures which spend much of their overhead producing millions of pixels that never hit the screen.

Cutting the redundant processing allows the chip makers to make smaller, cheaper chips. Trident's planned XP4 chip will sport 30 million transistors and is expected to appear in cards on offer for less than $100.

Although also supporting the DirectX 9.0 beta, the XP4 is geared towards full DirectX 8.1 compatability through the BrightPixel rendering engine, which includes both fully-programmable vertex and pixel shaders, to enable 3D graphics programmers to individually colour each pixel uniquely, sources state.

The XP4's SmartTile memory architecture will support either 64-bit or 128-bit memory bus interface with DDR DRAM at clock rates of up to 666MHz DDR.

XP4 samples have been available since May and Trident has been pushing the low-power chip as a laptop chip. However, according to Ebnews here the chip represents Trident's, "Return to the desktop mainstream and performance segments," they say Trident marketing vice president, Le Nguyen said. µ