The Radeon brand is 25 years old, and ATI could be 40
It's scary to say, but the Radeon brand first appeared in the headlines of the world's press exactly a quarter of a century ago. The R100 chip sold under this brand was released in April, but there was a legal ban on publishing reviews and tests until August, so the new brand appeared in the press in late summer.
Radeon provided players with the advanced experience of DirectX 7.0, supported advanced lighting models, and HyperZ, a technology that allowed for more efficient use of the graphics accelerator's memory. The accelerator operated at a fantastic frequency of 183 MHz, both GPU and memory. DirectX 7.0 was the first to calculate three-dimensional sound, implement the effect of image reflection from surfaces, and calculate geometry and lighting changes on the GPU.
An excursion into history
The Canadian company Array Technologies Inc. was founded in August 1985, exactly 40 years ago. At the end of 1985, the company was renamed ATI Technologies, with ATI being the reverse acronym. From the very beginning, the company developed chips to accelerate graphical computing, first for industrial computers, and when personal computers appeared, for them as well. In 1998, the company became the market leader.
However, in August 1999, Nvidia, having had enough of the Riva line, released a video card with a fundamentally new GeForce architecture (Geometry Force), which took away the calculation of geometry changes from the processor ( TL calculations - Transform and Light), which significantly accelerated graphics at that time. The ATI Rage 128 Pro couldn't compete on equal terms, so ATI began to radically change the architecture and implement its own TL. Similarly to the main competitor, to emphasise the significance of the changes, the company abandoned the old name of the video cards and released a new product under the Radeon brand. At the time, no one could have imagined that this brand would outlive the company.
In 2002, ATI launched the Imageon line of mobile graphics chips, which was in tune with Radeon. In 2005, the company's founder Kwok Yuen Ho resigned and in less than a year, it was bought by AMD for $5.4 billion. Until 2010, the ATI name was retained in the product name, but then the company switched to its own AMD brand. AMD itself, after a period of financial success in the mid-2000s, suffered more than a little trouble when Intel released its revolutionary Core 2 technology and was forced to sell off its assets in 2009. Not only was the company's own chip production sold, which became GlobalFoundries Inc. but also its mobile chip division Imageon. Imageon was bought by Qualcomm, an American manufacturer of ARM processors, which did not keep the brand but used the name Adreno, which is an anagram of the word Radeon. Despite the financial problems, AMD managed to maintain the production of video cards, which kept the entire company afloat in times of problems in the processor division. In 2011, the ATI brand and legal entity were closed, and AMD took over the business.
Out of the whole host of video card manufacturers (D3 Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Matrox, Rendition, VIA Graphics, 3dfx, etc.), only Radeon and GeForce survived. The production started by ATI is currently the oldest still alive on the market. The Radeon brand has been associated with AMD for 19 years - three times longer than it was managed by ATI. And the company's technology has had a major impact on both computer and mobile graphics.