Parhelia Drivers?

[Unicron]

Hi there dudes, sorry to ask this I just wondered if Haig hinted when there will be a driver update, its been about 3 months now, does this mean that the driver development team has been cut down so much, that it takes them 3 months to bring out new drivers?

Also this announcement in April in the Matrox Newsletter is this gonna be a Parhelia Refresh with higher clock speeds or is it a Vanta Parhelia with 64mb and no triple head?

Thanks in advance.

[MaartenLierop]

Why is everybody here always searching for things that could feed for their believe that Matrox is going down??
I tought this was a "fan" website, but there is no place where so many negative rumors are made than this site.

The driver team has probably a few other things to do. They will come with a new card next month, so they should be busy right now to give it a nice set of drivers. This is much more important for Matrox than the release of the Parhelia drivers at the moment. The drivers are working, and things can always be better ofcourse. But I don't think it has the highest priority at the moment.

And the new card, if it is a parhelia based one, is a cheaper version. But it has some video capabilities added.

[UtwigMU]

Most likely Parhelia 1.15 G650 MX LE Vanta.

On a serious note, Haig was reffering to the card more similar to what G450 was to G400 than what G400 was to G200.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by MaartenLierop

I tought this was a "fan" website, but there is no place where so many negative rumors are made than this site.

It certainly is not a fan site. It's a user site.

[Byock]

Originally posted by Wombat
It certainly is not a fan site. It's a user site.

Well said. Could not have said it better myself. I would not hold my breath waiting for a faster card from M anytime soon.

[Unicron]

On a serious note, Haig was reffering to the card more similar to what G450 was to G400 than what G400 was to G200

I regard to this quote would you say that the next Parhelia,will it be a faster cheaper solution?

Could you tell what this refers too what are the main differences between the g400-g450 and the g200-g400?

Thanks.

[Byock]

No, the G450 was SLOWER than the G400. The G400 was a step above the G200, much faster, better features.

[Unicron]

I dont understand why Matrox would bring out a card that is slower than the Parhelia, wouldnt it make sense just too shrink the die on the chip bump the clock speeds of the core/mem and take out things like triple head that people dont necessarily use that much, which would make the card alot cheaper, this is the reason why the Parhelia is so expensive because of the 3 ramdacs on the card.

[Sasq]

The G450 was very popular with business, and it later became an MMS product...

Please remember the home/consumer market is Jam, corp/oem is bread and butter.

Dan

[borat]

Originally posted by Unicron
I dont understand why Matrox would bring out a card that is slower than the Parhelia, wouldnt it make sense just too shrink the die on the chip bump the clock speeds of the core/mem and take out things like triple head that people dont necessarily use that much, which would make the card alot cheaper, this is the reason why the Parhelia is so expensive because of the 3 ramdacs on the card.

many issues with this. die shrink = huge cost of redesign then 0.13 micron is in its infancy and would take months for retail boards on the tech to come out. right now matrox has thousands of parhelia chips to sell on and it wont make new chips untill they are gone.clock speed can be bumped up without major redisign which wont happen untill the old chips are sold.things like triple head are what makes parhelia worth having as its features sell it not its performance. and parhelia is not expensive because of the third ramdac, its expensive because the chip is comp[lex probably has low yeilds and took a lot of $'s to design the 3rd ramdac costs pence.

[jackzod]

Originally posted by borat
right now matrox has thousands of parhelia chips to sell on and it wont make new chips untill they are gone.clock speed can be bumped up without major redisign which wont happen untill the old chips are sold.

Well one day they'll have to move on to other things, old chip sold or not, or they might never move to something else...

[borat]

Originally posted by jackzod
Well one day they'll have to move on to other things, old chip sold or not, or they might never move to something else...

indeed - worrying times for matrox, you cant just keep curning out chips that go unsold. but remember the G400 - it spawned the G450 and G550 which both sold in decent enough amounts, there is no reason to beleive that the parhelia core will be any different.

[UtwigMU]

The problem is they spent 2 years developing G450 and G550 whoose only benefits over G400 are better 2nd RAMDAC, low profile and Headcasting.

During that time they have likely wasted plenty resources, time and also delayed Parhelia's launch.

If the G550 would have been the G800 (GeForce 2 - GeForce 3 or GeForce 4MX class), they would sell manny more of those at current price.

Same problem can happen with Parhelia. It doesn't hurt you as much if you don't have a performance leader, but if your card is 1 generation behind at launch and when current leader trickles into mainstream this leaves your mainstream card 2 generations behind.

For instance manny OEM PCs offer GF 4MX over G550 or G450. And average users choose G450 or G550 only when building strictly 2D machine and/or when they plan on using 2 monitors.


I hope Matrox doesn't repeat the same mistake again:

Waste 1 year developing Parhelia 1.5 (Sundog) and introduce it to the market when R400 and nV35 are performance leaders and R9600 and value nVidia DX9 Ti 4 class cards are mainstream priced at 100. You have to know, that those cards all have two monitors features (worse than Matrox, but still)

And delay developement and launch of Parhelia 2 (Pitou) untill it's too far behind to compell good margins or move in big volumes.

Developing a new core and preparing manufacturing of it (litography masks, refining process) takes money and although they could save some money if the new value core would be more integrated and cheaper to make, they would loose those gains in R&D.

Instead they should:
- respin current Parhelia core (Manufacturing is cheap compared to developement of a new core.) as value card, (like Radeon -> Radeon 7500, Radeon 8500 -> 9100, Geforce 2 -> GeForce 4MX) and disable some features in the boards and/or drivers

This card should fullfill the current G550's spot.

- develop and release Parhelia 2 (Pitou) in Q3 this year

[borat]

Originally posted by UtwigMU
The problem is they spent 2 years developing G450 and G550 whoose only benefits over G400 are better 2nd RAMDAC, low profile and Headcasting.

During that time they have likely wasted plenty resources, time and also delayed Parhelia's launch.

If the G550 would have been the G800 (GeForce 2 - GeForce 3 or GeForce 4MX class), they would sell manny more of those at current price.

Same problem can happen with Parhelia. It doesn't hurt you as much if you don't have a performance leader, but if your card is 1 generation behind at launch and when current leader trickles into mainstream this leaves your mainstream card 2 generations behind.

For instance manny OEM PCs offer GF 4MX over G550 or G450. And average users choose G450 or G550 only when building strictly 2D machine and/or when they plan on using 2 monitors.


I hope Matrox doesn't repeat the same mistake again:

Waste 1 year developing Parhelia 1.5 (Sundog) and introduce it to the market when R400 and nV35 are performance leaders and R9600 and value nVidia DX9 Ti 4 class cards are mainstream priced at 100. You have to know, that those cards all have two monitors features (worse than Matrox, but still)

And delay developement and launch of Parhelia 2 (Pitou) untill it's too far behind to compell good margins or move in big volumes.

Developing a new core and preparing manufacturing of it (litography masks, refining process) takes money and although they could save some money if the new value core would be more integrated and cheaper to make, they would loose those gains in R&D.

Instead they should:
- respin current Parhelia core (Manufacturing is cheap compared to developement of a new core.) as value card, (like Radeon -> Radeon 7500, Radeon 8500 -> 9100, Geforce 2 -> GeForce 4MX) and disable some features in the boards and/or drivers

This card should fullfill the current G550's spot.

- develop and release Parhelia 2 (Pitou) in Q3 this year

sounds like a plan to me. - wonder if they have the resources left to do so though?and next part was shceduled to be 0.09 micron = no 2003 release if this is true.

[UtwigMU]

Where does this 0.09 micron rumour come from?

IIRC it's from UMC going directly from .15 to .09, skipping .13. Therefore some people concluded that Parhelia 2 will be done on that process.

However Kruzin pointed out numerous times, that UMC is merely packaging the cores and that who produces them is secret.

Parhelia 2, aka Pitou did according to rumours tape out.

IIRC nV30 taped out arround August/September (Q3) and will be out now (Q2). Parhelia 2 taped out arround december. If things go well and if it isn't canned it should be out in Q3.