There will be the temptation for people to look at R420 and NV40 and compare the differences between the two. Clearly NVIDIA have a compelling part in terms of features and the performance – while R420 is unlikely to disappoint much in terms of performance, in comparison it looks a little behind the curve in terms of feature set.

I think the main feature that people are looking at is the 3.0 shader model and I think that’s a valid question. What we felt was that in order to really appeal to the developers who are shipping volume games in ’04 Shader 2.0 would be the volume shader model of use. We do think it will be important down the road.

How much of this comes down to engineering resource? Would it have actually been possible for you to have had a Shader 3.0 part available now if you’d wanted to, at a reasonable performance level?

As you say, there’s always trade-off’s. There’s the trade-off of performance and die size. The answer is yes we could – the die size would have been fairly large to the point where we weren’t sure how produce-able it would be in 130nm and we didn’t think that 90nm was really going to be there for ’04 production. Now, NVIDIA has put something in 130nm that’s die size is 10-15% bigger and there’s still some understanding we have to get on their architecture.

In comparison to NV40 do you think you undershot the expectations for die size this time around, or do you feel that larger die sizes than R420 are not really feasible at this point in time?

We focused on performance, schedule, features and cost. Our trade-off was that we wanted to maintain our performance leadership and hit a die size that we felt could be produced in volume. ATI is very confident that we picked the best path for the enthusiast market in 2004.

With respect to engineering resources its been suggested to us that the “West Coast Team” (Santa Clara - Silicon Valley) has become the main focus for all the PC parts coming from ATI and that now even R500, which we initially understood to be an “East Coast Team” (Marlborough) product, is being designed at Santa Clara. Is it the case that Santa Clara will mainly produce the PC parts now, while Marlborough will be active with “special projects” such at the next X-Box technologies?

We had this concept of the “ping-pong” development between the west and east coast design centres. On paper this looked great, but in practice it didn’t work very well. It doesn’t work well for a variety of reasons, but one of them is the PC architecture, at the graphics level, has targeted innovation and clean sheet innovation and whenever you have separate development teams you are going to, by nature, have a clean sheet development on every generation of product. For one, we can’t afford that and its not clear that it’s the right thing to do for our customers from a stability standpoint. Its also the case that’s there’s no leverage from what the other development team has done, so in some cases you are actually taking a step backwards instead of forwards.

What we are now moving towards is actually a unified design team of both east and west coast, that will develop our next generations of platforms, from R300 to R400 to R500 to R600 to R700, instead of a ping-pong ball between them both. Within that one organisation we need to think about where do we architecturally innovate and where do we not in order to hit the right development cycles to keep the leadership, but it will be one organisation.

If you dissect in, for example, to the R600 product, with is our next, next generation, that development team is all three sites - Orlando, Silicon Valley, Marlborough – but the architectural centre team is in the Valley, as you point out, but all three are part of that organisation.

Would I be correct in suggesting that mainly Marlborough and Orlando would be the R&D centres – with the design of various algorithms for new 3D parts – while the Santa Clara team would be primarily responsible for implementing them in silicon?

No, because the architecture of the R300 and R500 is all coming from the Valley, but we’ve got great architects in all three sites.

Bob Drebin in the Valley is in charge of the architecture team and so he’s in charge of the development of all the subsequent architectures but he goes out to the other teams key leaders and that forms the basis of the unified architectural team. At an implementation level, you’re right – Marlborough is mainly focused on the “special projects” and that will probably be another 18 to 24 months for them. So the R600 family will mainly be centred primarily in the Valley and Orlando with a little bit from Marlborough, and then the R800 would be more unified.