Bitboys Interview - February 2000

Please introduce yourself and let us know what you do at Bitboys.

My name is Shane Long and I am the President and CEO of Bitboys Inc. and Oy.

How did Bitboys form as a company?

The company was actually formed by a group of individuals who had a great deal of experience in visual simulation and 3D graphics design. They basically wrote some very impressive a very fast software engines before the mass availability of good 3D accelerators.

What experience do your engineers have in the 3D market?

Most have backgrounds relating to 3D hardware and/or software algorithms

Tell us a little about the Glaze3D and what makes it so special.

We have designed a completely new approach to 3D acceleration, Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture. XBA technology was invented during the design of our current 3D-graphics architecture. XBA consists of the eight-texel/four-pixel rendering pipeline, extremely wide 512-bit memory bus and our memory management logic. The memory management logic works as a highway system tying together the embedded DRAM memory, the external SDRAM memory, AGP memory and all units, which want access to the memory. A lot of the XBA inventions are behind this memory system, which handles 768 bits of data (eDRAM+AGP+SDRAM) every clock cycle, resulting in the massive bandwidth of 12.5 GB/s.

This huge bandwidth enables us to do everything in true color; we are not really interested in any 16-bit performance and dithered images. The bandwidth also allows us to do full-scene Anti-Aliasing with real supersampling. Although rendering game graphics at 1024x768 true-color resolutions requires around 2.5 GB/s of memory bandwidth, doing this with anti-alias enabled requires 10 GB/s of memory bandwidth! To say this in another way, products equipped with only external SDR or DDR memory are not able to do full-scene anti-aliasing at realistic speeds. The XBA architecture based products are really the first chips capable of improving the image quality with Anti-Aliasing

When can we finally expect Glaze3D products to ship? We've seen the "1st half of 2000" statement on your website, but can you be any more specific?

We will be demonstrating the first XBA enabled product in 2Q and reach full volume production in the 3Q.

The Glaze3D originally sounded great on paper when it was announced long ago, but by the time it's actually available, 3dfx should have their Voodoo 4 & 5 products, while NVIDIA will be looking to NV11 & NV15 to keep them going. How do you see the Glaze3D stacking up in such a competitive market?

We feel that the part will be very competitive and with extraordinary performance due to the only 8-texel engine and the memory bandwidth to actually achieve huge filtrates. In terms of texel fill rate, 3dfx will need the V5 6000 four-chip solution to even stay close and Nvidia will still only be half of the Glaze3D 1200 product. The Glaze3D 2400 being double again that performance level at over two gigatexels will clearly be the market leader in fill rate. We do believe that our architecture is superior.

Do you actually have any Glaze3D silicon at this point in time? Or are you still working off simulators?

The simulators are running very well, but as of yet we do not have working silicon in house.

Who will be producing boards based on the Glaze3D?

We are in discussions with several board manufacturers to market our products. Actually we will be using a fairly clean model of distribution by focusing initially on a limited number of partners and really enabling them to succeed in the market.

What do you expect the typical memory configuration to be?

We believe that you will see three levels of XBA enabled board level products for the various markets: 41MB (9MB edram, 32 MB sdram) 50 MB (18MB edram, 32 MB sdram) Dual processor 82 MB (18MB edram, 64 MB sdram) Dual processor

In what price range do you expect these products?

I do not want to speculate on our partners pricing models, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that our pricing will be more than in line with expectations form the both the basic gamer and enthusiasts alike.