[KLUG Hardware] Matrox Parhelia-512 leaked ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

Matrox is a small, Canadian company that has built mindshare in, at
least, recent years for being a "no-hype, solid board" company.  They
focus on retail, including customization of their own products.  This
used to translate into withholding technical specs in their earlier
years, but now they are far more open, have excellent, supported Linux
drivers.  They freely admit where their products are good, and where they
are not so good.

Normally Matrox has been ready to admit that their product couldn't
compete with nVidia or even ATI's latest offerings.  But in this new /.
post, it appears that Matrox is going to change all that:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/12/0610221

Most specifically, see these two posts:
http://forums.matroxusers.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32858
http://ixbt.com/video2/matrox-parhelia512.shtml

As you'll note, the single chip has everything integrated.  From the
512-bit video controller with a 256-bit DDR memory bus, two dual-display
controllers (for upto 4 outputs) as well as DVD/HDTV decoders for
video-in (possibly an external option for analog in/out?), it sounds
like Matrox is going for an "one-chip fits all" approach.  Matrox has
always led everyone in multi-head design and features, and their custom
video decoder designs have always quality/fidelity-bested the
competition that usually just slaps them onto their boards.

The chip itself is powerful.  Built for DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0
(hopefully OpenGL drivers will surface faster than the G-series did 
;-), 4 pixel shaders and 4 vertex shaders and a whopping 20GBps aggregate
memory bandwidth.  Matrox is also pushing a modification of its
environmental bump mapping called displacement mapping.  Probably the
most convincing shots of the technology are of the Grand Canyon and the
golf ball.  They also show off what they say is 16x full screen anti-
aliasing (FSAA) for movie-quality rendering in real-time.

All-in-all, small little Matrox has created one heck of a product to
combat the powers in the graphics arena.  Although it's doubtful that
Matrox can keep up with the 9-month cycle of nVidia and ATI, they have
at least given themselves a product that is 6+ months ahead of where
nVidia and ATI are now -- possibly enough to keep the series
"competitive" for 24 months or so.  Although this all depends on how
quickly they can get the product out and, more importantly, the
drivers to match.  Hopefully Linux drivers will be including in this
strategy like nVidia has shown can be done.

-- Bryan

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com