ATI Gives Chipsets a Try - Introducing the Radeon IGP

One Driver for All

Much like NVIDIA's unified driver architecture model, ATI has coined the term FlexFIT for their Radeon IGP unified driver model. Without actually looking at the Radeon IGP drivers we can't make a comparison between ATI's model and NVIDIA's but as far as we can tell they are relatively similar at least conceptually. A single installation package will be used for all of the integrated features of the chipset.

The Biggest Win - Notebooks

If you've been reading carefully up to this point you'll realize that the Radeon IGP doesn't sound like anything more than a conventional PC chipset except with improved integrated graphics; and in fact, that's a very good way of summing it up. But there is one key point that we've left out until this point, the Radeon IGP is designed for operation in desktop and mobile systems. One of the biggest wishes virtually everyone mentioned in their articles on NVIDIA's nForce was the hope that the technology would make it to the mobile world. NVIDIA has always taken the stance that it's a logical progression for nForce to go mobile but there isn't enough power saving logic in the chipset as it stands today to make that possible; with the Radeon IGP however, it is quite possible.

To make things even more interesting, ATI can build Radeon IGP chipsets for both the Athlon XP and the Pentium 4 as they're fully licensed for the two platforms. This is something that even NVIDIA cannot claim. It also means that ATI will be almost a lone ranger in the mobile Pentium 4 market.

The first time we ever saw the Radeon IGP was in a notebook demonstration at Fall Comdex 2001 (yet another very interesting thing that we couldn't let you all know about) and more recently during IDF we were able to take a look at a few more notebooks running the chipset. The chipset is running Windows XP just fine and there didn't seem to be any major issues during the demo, hopefully indicating that ATI is on track with their release schedule.