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It's the end of an era, folks. In the coming months, AMD will retire the ATI brand, letting the ATI name ride off into the sunset after a remarkable 25-year run, presumably never to be seen again. Don't mistake that to mean AMD is getting out of the graphics business -- it isn't -- but once the brand is dropped, you won't see the ATI name attached to any new Radeon, FirePro, or EyeFinity products.
The decision came after AMD sent out surveys to several thousand "discrete graphics aware" respondents spread out across the U.S., U.K., Germany, China, Japan, Brazil, and Russia. According to John Volkmann, AMD's VP of global corporate marketing, "the Radeon brand and the ATI brand are equally strong with respect to conveying our graphics processor offering." That might be so, but it doesn't tell the full story behind ATI and its 25 year tenure in the graphics business, one that includes witnessing the rise and fall of 3dfx, and continued participation in what's largely become a two-man battle in the discrete graphics space.
Join us as we take a look back at some of the most important periods and events in ATI's history, starting with when it was formed in 1985.
About 25 years ago, several things happened. Super Mario Bros. for the original Nintendo Entertainment System was released in Japan, Michael J. Fox jeopardized the time space continuum by traveling willy-nilly through time, Coca-Cola inexplicably changed its formula and released New Coke, and Array Technology Industry, the company that would later be known as ATI Technologies, was formed by Lee Ka Lau, Benny Lau, and Kwok Yuen Ho.
Between the three of them, the trio had saved up $300,000, not enough to start a computer firm, but enough capital to form a graphics company. And that's what they did, kicking things off with a staff of six. Being a small upstart in Canada, PC makers were at first apprehensive about using ATI parts, and in just four months, that $300,000 well had run dry. Luckily for ATI -- and for the rest of us -- a bank in Singapore funneled $1.5 million into ATI in the form of a business loan, keeping the company afloat long enough to sustain itself.
Fun Fact: The "Array" in ATI refers to the "gate arrays" that were used in making customer ICs, a method which was later replaced by using ASIC (application-specific integrated circuits) technology.
You always remember your first, and for ATI, that's the "Small Wonder." Built using ASIC technology, the Small Wonder lived up to its name by supporting all standards, monitors, and systems that had been shipping at the time.
Image Credit: VGA Legacy
It came with an 8-bit ISA bus, up to 64KB of video memory, and supported up to a 640x200 resolution in Monochrome or CGA glory. Don't laugh, this was cutting edge stuff back then!
Without support from computer manufacturers, that $1.5 million loan would have only delayed the inevitable for ATI, buying the company only a year of breathing room before it would be time to close shop. But that never happened, because before ATI ran out of money, the company secured Commodore as a customer in 1986, supplying the world's most popular PC maker of all time with 7,000 graphics chips a week. Going from rags to riches, ATI grew from a company owing $1.5 million to pulling in $10 million in revenue in its first year alone. Equally important, landing Commodore showed the computing world that ATI had the moxie to be a major player in the graphics market.
Fun Fact: With sales estimating from 17 million to 30 million units worldwide, the Guinness Book of World Records recognizes the Commodore 64 as best selling PC of all time. Pretty impressive when you consider the C64 sold for around $600 at launch, which if you account for inflation, is roughly $9 zillion today.
In 1986, color PCs had begun to appear, and the timing couldn't have been better. Having tasted the sweet nectar of success and with a pocket full of revenue, ATI kicked out its first graphics card under its own brand in 1987, the EGA Wonder. Built around IBM's "Enhanced Graphics Adapter" standard, the EGA Wonder delivered 16 colors at a resolution up to 640x350. A second card -- the EGA Wonder 800 -- would kick things up a notch by supporting an 800x600 resolution.
Image Credit: pctuning.tyden.cz
Later on, ATI would follow suit with the VGA Wonder. This was a 16-bit card that also included a two-button mouse port, which came as a boon to anyone who had already tapped out their available serial ports.
In addition to being ATI's first graphics card under its own brand, the EGA Wonder and VGA Wonder brought into existence the "Wonder" trademark. ATI would later use the Wonder nomenclature to describe its graphics cards that came with a built-in TV tuner.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
The Mach8 wasn't just an important milestone for ATI, it ranks as a noteworthy blip in the world of PCs, and graphics in general. With the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990, Microsoft's OS had begun to grow in popularity, and it also created a need for 2D acceleration. ATI answered the call with the Mach8, the first ATI product to process graphics independently of the CPU. It was also the first -- and one of the few -- graphics cards to support IBM's 8514/A display standard. But perhaps most importantly, the Mach8 erased any doubt that the graphics card business was here to stay.
From a hardware standpoint, the Mach8 came with 512KB or 1MB of DRAM or VRAM and could support up to a 1024x768 screen resolution. The Mach8 chip was also used on a handful of other cards, such as the 8514 Ultra, 8514 Vantage, and VGA Wonder GT.
Image Credit: Flickr joseph a
After eight years in the graphics business, ATI went public with stocks listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. By that time, ATI's annual sales had ballooned to around CAD$230 million, but it wasn't smooth sailing after becoming a public company. For the fiscal year ended August 31, 1994, ATI posted its first lost, a CAD$2.7 million decline on sales of CAD$232.3 million. The stock subsequently took a nosedive from around CAD$20 to less than CAD$5. What's more, ATI was getting left behind in the world of chip design, which had been transitioning from 32-bit to 64-bit. A saving grace was on the horizon, however, in the form of the Mach64.
Comments are closed on this article
onlyhtml
April 03, 2011 at 2:13am
Goodbye, ATI. Don't screw your new line of graphic cards up, whenever you may make them.
wirehedd
October 01, 2010 at 6:29pm
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several thousand "discrete graphics aware" respondents spread out across the U.S., U.K., Germany, China, Japan, Brazil, and Russia. According to John Volkmann, AMD's VP of global corporate marketing, "the Radeon brand and the ATI brand are equally strong with respect to conveying our graphics processor offering."
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This statement is pure utter horseshit. They wanted to just claim the advances and reputational achievements for themselves and seeing as the ATI brand name ECLIPSED AMDs status as a graphics producer they will eliminate that problem.
Pricks.
Never buying another AMD product again foir JUST this reason as I know people who were engineers at ATI in Newmarket Ontario who bustedf their asses for that company and to make it what it became.
AMD can blow me.
Skrýmir
October 02, 2010 at 8:54pm
Have fun spending 999 dollars on a Hexa-core CPU, dude. You're over analyzing the situation, even more so than AMD. ATI has had a huge role in AMD's success as of late, but i don't think there was some huge agenda behind the name change.
huhhuh
September 29, 2010 at 7:58am
The tv input part crapped out after one year of ownership/
I paid 350 for it in 2004.
Another fact I hated was loose proprietary connector on the back of it.
That was my last ATI video card.On a side note, I can't believe that major technical website has the most major spam problems with most major spam protection that pisses off it's regular users.
Skrýmir
October 02, 2010 at 8:56pm
Of course they're going to be more likely to get spammed than a less popular website.
CentiZen
September 28, 2010 at 7:08pm
No dipshit, they don't think that at all. And infact, it has nothing to do with AMD's products, even though they are fine chips that intel fanboys feel threatened by (hence your derogatory post). Now the concepts of business might be a little much for you little fanboy, but supporting and maintaining a brand name gets more difficult and expensive as it gains in size, and it makes perfect fiscal sense for AMD to consolidate the two into a single entity.
You still there? Or have you gone back to watching RayWilliamJohnson and listening to the black eyed peas?
aziobron
September 28, 2010 at 10:10pm
you dont have to be an asshole with your explaination. perhaps he didnt think of that aspect when trying to figure it out. he made a simple comment and you fired back with a rude paragraph. douche
sniggler
September 28, 2010 at 3:46pm
I was sad when they were bought out by AMD, and now I'm even sadder. This marks the death of a great brand, regardless of how they may or may not have been backed by AMD for the past couple of years.
Having been an ATI fan for ages, I was disappointed to find myself swapping my 5850 recently for 2 GTX 460's in SLI. I originally intended to run 2 x 5850's in Crossfire, but buggy drivers (see cursor glitch in SC2) and poor minimum framerates, combined with AMD's second-rate customer service and being unable to find another reference 5850 anywhere save for a used one... The list goes on and on.. Oh and did I mention the ridiculous prices of the 5850 until they recently started to trickle down? Sure it was cheap when it launched, and that's how it should have stayed - at the $250 price point, not the painful $350 I paid for mine at the time.
Alas, my GTX 460 1GB models are wiping the floor with the ref / non-ref 5850 xfire combo I had tested for a short time before returning the non-ref card (it was just fugly; way too long for my case and completely dashed my plans of using a liquid cooled solution down the road). SLI scales better, hell even my first GTX 460 by itself was outperforming my 5850 in the games I played thanks to improved drivers and more game companies jumping on the Green bandwagon to optimize their code for NV gpu's.
On a side note, ATI chips were being used in some gamecube models before the Wii was ever released, so to say that the Wii was the first Nintendo product to incorporate an ATI gpu isn't entirely accurate.
Very sad to see yet another great brand die out in the PC industry. 3DFX, BFG, ATI, who's next? Yes, I know you could argue that ATI lives on thru the AMD brand, but given my experience these past few months, not so.
noobstix
September 28, 2010 at 9:45am
My very first Radeon GPU was the 9200SE (128 MB). At the time I had it (which was in the late 90s), it was able to handle some games better than my S3 ViRGE card (which only had 64 MB). It wasn't until I realized that it was more than just the amount of memory on a video card that factored into gaming performance was when I convinced my dad to shell out a little more on a video card than normal. I got myself a Radeon X1650 Pro which really satisified me for a few years since some games I was able to run on high detail while other games I could run on medium detail. In these past 5 years, I've had to move on from that X1650 Pro in order to get something with more juice to play the more recent games. That's when my brother gave me his Radeon HD3650 which was definitely much faster (I think about double the speed). Now I'm rolling with my Radeon HD5770 and will be proud that I have one of the last generations of video cards with the ATI name on it. I think this video card will last me a few more years before I pass it down to my dad or oldest brother to make way for whatever AMD series comes up (probably the 7000 or 8000 series or whatever they'll call it).
Radeon 9200SE (ATI) --> Radeon X1650 Pro (ATI) --> Radeon HD3650 (Diamond) --> Radeon HD5770 (Diamond)
RAF
September 28, 2010 at 3:11am
This is one of the most enjoyable articles that I have read on a long time.
Thanks Paul, and keep on the good work.
Chriscic
September 27, 2010 at 11:07pm
" and viewing the entry-level and mid-range markets as almost an afterthought all led to 3dfx's eventual demise."
No, actually it was the opposite. 3DFX management always said the big money was on the motherboard, and buying mb manufacturer STB was what sunk them. Voodoo 4/5 was also greatly delayed by everyone working on the Banshee mid-range part. If they'd stuck to designing high-end they would have survived at least a few years longer than they did.
This recollected quite clearly by a stockholder who suffered big losses.
andrewc513
September 27, 2010 at 6:48pm
First DX7 card in 2007? Crap, PS3/360 was waaaay ahead of their time. :P
Simple typo, awesome article!
Pylon
September 27, 2010 at 6:21pm
Minor mistake:
On p. 3, you mention "The very first Radeon card debuted in 2007 and was a DirectX 7 part." The year is obviously off.
dmonkyking
September 27, 2010 at 6:16pm
Well it was a good run and I'll miss the ATI name. They put out some good products (just not so good drivers). I think I still have my old All-In-Wonder and Rage II cards in a box somewhere too, think I'll keep them for sentimental reasons.
JohnP
September 27, 2010 at 10:35pm
"So I will keep it always!" syndrome. That leads to a closet full of old computer crap that is worthless. Folks are going to die and their kin are going to say "what the hell is this thing?" and (hopefully) recycle it. Why not save them the aggravation and recycle it yourself.
I have a "one year rule". Have I touched it in a year? If not, do I really need to keep it?
Havok
September 27, 2010 at 6:23pm
D.I.P.R.I.P now! Blasted spammers, we don't need their kind here...
