ant says no G800 announcement soon

[xortam]

In the valley I normally only see "work at will" agreements, not employee contracts. The non-disclosure contracts cover intellectual property rights but don't exclude an employee from leaving and gaining employment with a competitor. A company can sue for stolen or "migrated" IP (as has happened many times here). These legal issues differ according to where (which State) an employee's place of work is rather than where the company is headquartered or incorporated. Its a matter of State law, not corporate policy.

[superfly]

When i meant photo realism,i didn't necessarily relate it to speed that can gained by making the chip smaller.

There is only so much to be gained by increasing the clock frequency of any given part,but that can only happen by making the chip as small and simple as possible.

What i meant by being able to use more transistors was to increase the functionality of the chip without necssarily increasing it's clock frequency.

Essentially making it handle multiple tasks in simultaniously in hardware but encompassing a lot more features than currently possible and improving current ones.

Like realtime ray traced lighting,wich would require a hugely powerful lighting unit in order to do it real time,that would require more transistors,no?

Alredy video card chip makers are using those tecniques,like going for 1 rendering pipeline to 2,4,etc...,same goes for texture unit's.

There's still a huge amount of distance to cover to get to that point,and my point was that until then there's going to be this kind of legal crap even though eveyone knows that those steps have to be taken.

Like the following example,one company is going to develop a particular feature first,the other company another,but at a given time they'll have to integrate those 2 features on the same chip to acheive the goal(photo realism).

That's when the legal cockfight starts....sigh.

[Greebe]

Cockfighting is illegal in the US also!

and your point was? LOL

[AlgoRhythm]

Hey Joel,

About that JEDEC comment above... Did you know that all of those lawsuits with Rambus involved have to do with patents they applied for, but didn't disclose it to JEDEC. Now it seems the SDRAM standards are using their patented techniques.

I think the whole arena of IP and patents are getting WAY out of hand anyway...


AlgoRhythm

(Yeah, off-topic, but I couldn't resist bringing it up)

[superfly]

If i have to make it even more simple for you to understand,then i'll give it one last try(storm understood it right away).

When ever engeneers integrate a new feature on a chip they strive to make it as simple as possible while still reaching their performance targets,mostly because it still isn't possible to cram 100 million transistors on a single chip yet,got it so far?.

The same goes for other conmpanies as well.

That means that in some cases,two video card chips,built by different companies that support that same feature could very well have a lot of similarities in the way they function internally to acheive this particular feature.

I mean there aren't 50 different ways to do multitexturing,bump mapping,etc...,while keeping the layout as simple as possible.

And in some extreme cases,it can happen that the there's almost no difference at all between the two chips that support th same feature,are you still following me here?.

To make matters worse,due to the fact that product releases happen very fast,6 months to a year(more for matrox.. ),engeneers might not have enough time to try to find another way to implement it,as to avoid those same I.P problems because the other company integrated that feature first and has the patents to prove it.

Do you still follow???

P.S...go look up the meaning of the word "METAPHOR"... .

[Joel]

And let me make this as simple as possible. You only know a very small part of what's going on between Matrox and nVidia.

Joel

[This message has been edited by Joel (edited 21 September 2000).]

[Greebe]

No da! Before you had your fun with us, disputing everything we've said in a forum which is there to discuss only things related to Matrox Hardware. Now it's in the "box" where anything goes (well just about).

Joel is correct, you only know the tip of the iceberg.

[Drizzt]

The tip???????????

Arghh...wasn't it "the top"?