Bitboys maakt kenbaar dat er nog steeds leven in de tent zit, want in een press release van gisteren wordt hun 'Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture ' aangekondigd. XBA maakt gebruik van 9MB embedded DRAM en heeft een bandbreedte van 12 tot 20GB/s. Nu alleen nog hopen dat we de Glaze3D ooit nog gereleased zien worden: (thanks Informer voor de tip):
Helsinki, Finland - January 24, 2000 - Bitboys has developed a completely new way of meeting the demanding requirements of 3D graphics processing. The revolutionary Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture™ (XBA™) utilizes Infineon Technologies AG's leading embedded memory technology (eDRAM) with 9 MB of extremely high speed memory integrated with the graphics engine and additional external memory to deliver unprecedented bandwidth to 3D graphics. The XBA™ technology has been created as part of company's Glaze3D project.The first chips utilizing XBA™ provide two to three times the memory bandwidth over the nearest competitors, totalling 12 Gigabytes/sec with a single processor and over 20 Gigabytes/sec in the dual processor configurations. This natural evolution of the traditional 3D graphics chip architecture will provide unseen performance gains for the 3D market.
The current high performance generation and also the recently announced graphics controllers for 2000 by today's leaders such as NVIDIA, 3dfx, and ATI are memory bandwidth limited by even the fastest DDR memory devices. This is the true bottleneck for gaming performance in the higher resolutions, scene complexities and color depths. XBA™ is the only true solution offered to this problem and will bring a completely new visual virtual environment with stunningly realistic image and color quality to the enthusiasts game market.
XBA™ enables the coming generations of Bitboys 3D processors to run 32-bit color, 32-bit textures and 32-bit Z-buffers with extreme detail at very high resolutions without the significant performance losses that current architectures experience.
"In the past the gaming community has always had to make the trade-off in terms of visual quality or fill rate derived performance", said Shane Long, President and CEO of Bitboys. "XBA™ will finally allow the gamer to set all visual qualities to the max and still derive amazing frame rates that will supersede anything they have been able to experience."
Bitboys plans to introduce the final product specifications, product names and target prices of the first XBA™ enabled products March 2000. Bitboys is scheduled to begin demonstrating the technology in Q2/2000 and ramping up full volume production of XBA enabled parts during Q3/2000.