okay, lets get back to the g800

[MetalCartman]

This (possible) partnership between Matrox and BitBoys kept me thinking the whole day...

Came to the following conclusions:

1. A card with a 2D-Matrox-Chip and a 3D-BitBoys-Chip doesn't make sense, if you think about manufacturing costs. Remember a few years ago, there were some cards with two chips on the market (S3 for 2D and Voodoo Rush for 3D, I think), they weren't really successfull.

2. If I was Matrox, I would try to get an exclusive license for the BitBoy architecture to implement it in my own chip. Interesting idea, huh? These guys at Matrox are very experienced in highly integrated GPUs... The BitBoys use embedded RAM, so why not integrate BitBoy's technology in the Gxx0-core, add 64MB of external DDR-RAM (128bit hehe), et voilà, you've got a real GeFart-Killer.

Maybe I'm just dreaming, but I'd really like to live, sorry, BUY this dream...

[Buback]

It seems like it would be really hard to combine two unique chip architectures into one working chip. Even if you could do it, i'm not sure if you would get what you expected from the final product. seems sort of like a frankenstien approch.

If matrox's next card will have a BB's chip in it, then what are those engineers doing? the g800 wasn't a compleat rumor(despite what matrox says) so where is it? did they just abandon it and replace it with a BB's chip? this doesn't sound right to me. I think matrox will make the core chip. maybe they will use a BB's T&L unit in a separate chip?

last I heard from BB's was two years ago. is their product still competative? what was it's specs anyway?

buback

[Topha]

last we heard about the g800 was two years ago

i liked frankenstein, and the chip itself doesnt have to look nice

it would be nice if matrox and the BB's had worked together on a really cool chip for all this time

[Buback]

hell, knowing matrox they would keep something like this secret all this time! :-)

and hasn't the g800 been mentioned in the drivers recently? (fusion and the like?) that's the closest thing to offical i've seen about it.

hehe, imagine a card with two halfs of a chip stiched together! :-)

[Ali]

Well well, look at this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/technews...-20010620.html

Stiched togeather chips anyone?

Cut/Paste

Why put multiple ICs on a circuit board when you can slice up the silicon, glue the pieces together, and have it all work as a single entity? While that may be an oversimplification of Alpine Microsystems DirectAttach IC packaging technology, it pretty much gives you an idea of what they’re doing. This week, the company announced that it has received a patent for the process. Alpine says that its DirectAttach method for interconnecting multiple ICs in an electronic system improves the electrical performance and allows an increased number of I/O pins to be used while minimizing printed circuit board area and avoiding thermal degradation of the IC substrate interface. DirectAttach is a companion technology to Alpine's MicroBoard substrate architecture. Basically, the technology could lead to really small computers (and other gadgets) by combining things like graphics, audio, and even a CPU in a single tiny package that can be plugged into a PCB as though it were one chunk of silicon.

[Nappe1]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Topha:
it wouldnt have to be a pure BB chip, how about a matrox/BB chip (matrox quality, BB features + enough speed to run those features)??
i would feel good about it </font>

That would be heaven for me. still I don't think that's going to happen. Matrox using BB's chip is possible though.

[Topha]

maybe a dual chip?? like the old 3dfx + matrox setup i had once, just that it will be a BB chip and all on one board

and of course it would have to be manufactured by matrox to guarantee high quality and shipping problems

[Nappe1]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Topha:
maybe a dual chip?? like the old 3dfx + matrox setup i had once, just that it will be a BB chip and all on one board

and of course it would have to be manufactured by matrox to guarantee high quality and shipping problems </font>

Topha, you are turning this conversation to non-trouble free area from my point of view... maybe I should draw a line here. Sorry, but I can't comment that.

[Topha]

well, i just finished school, will move to another town soon and plan on buying a new pc soon (sold my old one a few month ago so i could concentrate on school), and im just hoping that i will be able to buy a high quality, high speed graphic board, and at the moment there is nothing out there for me, except for radeon 64mb and kyro II, but both of them seem to have some problems that need fixing

so at the moment im pretty bored and spend a lot of time doing nothing but hanging around

[Buback]

these are strange days indeed.

[Nappe1]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Buback:
It seems like it would be really hard to combine two unique chip architectures into one working chip. Even if you could do it, i'm not sure if you would get what you expected from the final product. seems sort of like a frankenstien approch.
</font>

as I said, based on facts that I know, I don't think this is possible. still, Bitboys chip could have good enough 2D quality for Matrox. in some old Glaze 3D interview, the main architects said that they have some new tricks to improve 2D Quality too.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">
If matrox's next card will have a BB's chip in it, then what are those engineers doing? the g800 wasn't a compleat rumor(despite what matrox says) so where is it? did they just abandon it and replace it with a BB's chip? this doesn't sound right to me. I think matrox will make the core chip. maybe they will use a BB's T&L unit in a separate chip?
</font>

I heard from very reliable source that Matrox has something coming, but project has been pushed back to drawing board several times. There is possibility that Bitboys have sold licenses of XBA technology.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">
last I heard from BB's was two years ago. is their product still competative? what was it's specs anyway?

buback</font>

aargh. sorry, I cannot comment that.

if you look texts at the bitboys website, you can get the idea. (There Theý are talking 12 MB eDRAM with 1024 bit bus, so their plans 'have lived' with time. Also one of the reasons why Glaze 3D was canned, was that they wanted to add DX8 compliant HW T&L, vertex and pixel shaders.)

and these infos you can easily get from their web pages and/or from some rare interviews they have given during last year.

[Buback]

speaking of bitboys, i saw an interview over at the tech report (tech-report.com or something)
Damn! that's alot of bandwidth! that's sweet, but if they threw in a simple HSR algorithm it would be even better. hell, maybe they will. (havn't checked their site yet, i'm lazy)

i had another thought. y'know how nvidia has this new motherboard chipset? well i was thinking, seeing as how with a t&L unit on a graphics card all this geometry info has to be sent over the agp bus, if that t&l unit was implemented as a seperate chip with a socket on the motherboard(like the cpu) would it be cheaper, bandwidth wise, to send the processed geometry data over the agp bus instead of the raw data?

anyway, back to matrox, i was thinking how the g550 doesn't give us any insight into what they have planing for new features. actualy, i guess we know that they have a t&L engine and will push matrix skinning, but this doesn't tell us if they might use some type of HSR or FSAA or any of the new features that have come up since the g400. i wish i knew what kinds of other new features they are cooking up? that's what i feel is the most disapoint part. :-(

[Nappe1]

Actually, about 2 years ago, I got an idea of 3D world chip which would have some ram for 3D world data(planes, shapes, polygon properties like texture matching code, plane reflections and other modifiers, etc.) and pre-processing unit (basic physic operations like acceleration, g-force, etc.) which would then send needed data to HW T&L rendering pipeline. This would reduce needed bandwidth in AGP for T&L data transfers minimal. It also would at last make CPU totally free from 3D graphics drawing.

too bad noone has yet done it.

[Buback]

yeah that'll probably happen sooner or latter.

I don't know where it will come from, graphiics chip makers or processor makers or what, but sooner or later there will be Hardware AI and physics chips.

now if the hardware T&L unit is on the graphics chip, it'll have to send geometry data to the physics processor and probably the AI unit before it can render it. So somehow They are going to have to interconnect all these chips, which may be on seperate cards. that sounds complex and slow, so i think someday (maybe 10 years) it'll just all go onto the motherboard like the cpu. with a digital siginal, we could even plug our monitors into a standard port, like a usb or firewire port, so we wouldn't even need a graphics card, just the chips.

[Nappe1]

Buback, I agree...


btw I am just curious, but let's make imagined situaton: IF Bitboys chip based graphics board would be out in 3 months, with little bit better image quality than ATI's Radeon cards, performance of GF3 (Plus much better FSAA) and with a price tag of 2/3 normal GF3 card...

<h3> if it would be like above, how many of you would be ready to change your nowadays GXX0 card to it? </h3>

I Repeat that situation is totally imagined. it has no reality basis. (or where the h*ll I know? )