FIC leaks ATI R350 data

Taste of own medicine

Details of ATI's R350 graphics chip have been inadvertently made public days ahead of the company's official announcement at CeBit. Oops.

ATI licensee First International Computer (FIC) yesterday emailed journalists a sneak preview of the products it plans to unveil at Spring Comdex, among them two cards based on the R350: the A98 and A98P.

ATI's own cards are expected to be dubbed the Radeon 9800 and Radeon 9800 Pro.

According to the FIC email, the R350 is based on an eight-pipeline architecture and a 256-bit internal bus. It features a 400MHz RAMDAC and supports AGP 8x. The A98's R350 will be clocked at 325MHz; the A98P's at 400MHz. The faster card sports a 460MHz memory interface connected to 256MB of DDR SDRAM. The A98's memory clock operates at 310MHz. It will ship with 128MB of DDR memory.

Both cards contain 512KB of serial Flash ROM, TV-out, support for simultaneous dual displays, and compatibility with Direct X 9.0 and OpenGL, according to the FIC press release, now yanked from the company's Web site.

For ATI this is merely a taste of its own medicine. Long-time Reg readers will recall that ATI provoked Steve Jobs' ire after pre-announcing in a press release of its own details of new Power Macs a couple of summers ago. This incident is said to have prompted Apple to build a relationship with Nvidia - until that point, ATI had been the Mac maker's sole graphics chip supplier. ®