Press release; Adam Connors, DigiTimes.com [Tuesday 16 April 2002]
Trident Microsystems, a US-based graphics chip maker, and its Taiwanese foundry partner United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) have released samples of Trident’s new XP4, a 3D graphics processor with a performance of one billion pixels/second with consumption of a maximum of three watts performance-per-watt twice that of products from Nvidia and ATI Technologies, the companies claim.
The XP4 is the first 3D graphics processor for notebooks built on 0.13-micron CMOS technology and full DirectX 8.1 visual and image quality hardware implementation. The package uses only 30 million transistors, half that of equivalent desktop models, thus the lower energy usage. The footprint of the thin/light notebook models, the XP4m16 and XP4m32, comes in a 31x31mm package, while packing 16/32MB of FBGA frame buffer memory. The discrete 250MHz XP4 comes with a 128-bit memory interface of up to 666MHz DDR clock speed.
XP4m16 and XP4m32 samples are due to be available in May.
