ATI go Cubic

about the GameCube and in particular their acquisition of ArtX, the company that was working to create graphics components for Nintendo when its console was still known as the Dolphin. The interview is well worth reading, and while normally we frown on snippets here at EuroGamer, this one tickled my fancy enough to warrant a breach of protocol.

According to Greg Buchner, ATI's vice president of research and development, the answer is no, the chip won't be a refrigerant-cooled Radeon engineered with space alien technology. The custom-designed processor the company will use (currently named Flipper) is impressive in its own right, though.

Presumably as a stipulation of its acquisition, ATI have left the ArtX team's work on Flipper untouched by the move. Obviously there people know what they are doing, as many are former Silicon Graphics employees. At the moment it looks like the chip will be a 0.18micron 202.5MHz part with about 3Mb of video memory. Apparently the relatively low amount of memory (less than a 1/10 of most PC graphics cards) is due to the fact that the medium is television and not high quality monitors. Have a poke around the interview for more information.