Exclusive: ATI To Give Away Free GPU-based Encoder And Says It will Beat Nvidia to 40nm

Is there no such thing as bad news or is no news good news?

From ATI’s point of view, it’s no news. Speaking Thursday at AMD’s analyst day, ATI’s graphics chief, Rick Bergman said it would continue with a steady as she goes. That’s no surprise as ATI has recently seen a resurgence in market share, revenue and reception by power users.

Next year, Bergman said ATI would build on its “sweet spot” strategy. Instead of building huge monolithic graphics cards as Nvidia does, it would continue to concentrate on great $200 to $300 parts and combine them to take on Nvdia’s high-end parts.

With no firm hardware to reveal, Bergman took a few shots at Nvidia’s widely reported mobile GPU failures and lack of DX10.1 support which, he said, is the easiest way for developers to get to DX11 next year.

Bergman said that although ATI was the first to smaller process fabs in the last few die shrinks, he wouldn't commit to being first to 40nm, instead saying that ATI would make the move when it was the right time. And although AMD's spinoff, The Foundry Company, will have the capability to build those 40nm parts next year, Bergman said that he doesn't expect ATI to be a customer yet. He said that will likely happen at 32nm.

Depite the lack of hardware news, Bergman said ATI would have an early present for its users; in December, the company expects to release a free GPU-based encoder that runs on modern Radeon cards. Based on the company’s new Stream API, the Avivo Video Encoder uses the parallel processing power of the GPU to transcode or encode video. Similar functionality has been available for Nvidia products under its CUDA API for months but the encoder is not free and published by Elemental Technologies.

Bergman also said that Avivo Video Encoder with a mid-range Radeon HD 4870 card will actually outperform Nvidia’s top-end GeForce GTX280 card in encoding tasks using Elemental’s Badaboom Media Converter. ATI’s Free Avivo Video Encoder will run on any 4000-series Radeon HD card.

Image Credit: ATI

Updated with clarification on when ATI would get to 40nm.