ATI to the rescue?

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Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
21,110
64
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What 3DFX did was not necessarily a bad thing, it was a new thing for them and that made it a risky thing to do, but multiple processors on a single PCB isn't fundamentally bad or foolish to pursue.

That 3dfx tried and failed with that strategy while AMD tried and succeeded can be something for historians to determine the why's. Could be critically fatal management decisions at 3dfx during development of the V5 and V6 or critically enabling management decisions at AMD during the development of the 3870 X2.

In any event if you think about it back when Voodoo 5 was released there really wasn't much of a market for dekstop quad-core systems either...could you imagine the epic fail that would have been for AMD or Intel had they tried to release four cores on one socket to the desktop back then?

edit: missed a word
 

Schadenfroh

Elite Member
Mar 8, 2003
38,416
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Could be critically fatal management decisions at 3dfx during development of the V5 and V6
3dfx's Voodoo4 and 5 series main flaws were the lack of hardware T&L and that they were delayed. Other than that, the voodoo5 was amazing for its time (the FSAA IQ was top notch and running games in their native GLIDE mode was nice). As far as overall strategy goes, I think one of the biggest mistakes that ushered in their downfall was buying STB and alienating all of the AIB makers by cutting them off and making all of their cards themselves. The final "nail in the coffin" was probably Intel switching the AGP standard from 3.3V to 1.5V and making all the "recent" 3dfx cards fry themselves and/or the motherboard if placed in a newer mobo.
 

Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
21,110
64
91
Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Could be critically fatal management decisions at 3dfx during development of the V5 and V6
3dfx's Voodoo4 and 5 series main flaws were the lack of hardware T&L and that they were delayed. Other than that, the voodoo5 was amazing for its time (the FSAA IQ was top notch and running games in their native GLIDE mode was nice). As far as overall strategy goes, I think one of the biggest mistakes that ushered in their downfall was buying STB and alienating all of the AIB makers by cutting them off and making all of their cards themselves. The final "nail in the coffin" was probably Intel switching the AGP standard from 3.3V to 1.5V and making all the "recent" 3dfx cards fry themselves and/or the motherboard if placed in a newer mobo.

Yeah I'd categorize that as a "fatal management decision at 3dfx" as clearly they either failed to effectively grease the proper paws at Intel to ensure such a transition would not result in such an outcome or they did something (deja vu NV) to royally piss off the Intel decision makers to which the cause-effect was said detrimental change-up in the AGP voltage plane.

Whatever the case, it sounds like 3dfx's downfall was in their not doing whatever needed to be done to ensure that Intel felt 3dfx's survival was in Intel's best interests. I'd call that a critically fatal management decision.
 

Atheus

Diamond Member
Jun 7, 2005
7,313
2
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If AMD don't have something in the works which can beat Intel by a wide margin they might as well give up now and just make mobile processors or something. They must know this, therefore, I am forced to conclude they do indeed have something in the 'pipeline' as it were.

And BTW - smaller budgets and smaller teams do not nescesarily mean worse technology. Look at Ferrari for example; they make far less money than companies like Ford but produce much better cars by lovingly hand-crafting each one from the best of the best materials and then selling them at a premium. Perhaps in the future there will be a market for processors produced in a way analagous to this - maybe it overclocks twice as far as standard processors, maybe it can handle extremely high or low temperatures, exremely high power, etc. Maybe it's capped with a solid gold heatspreader or something...