ATI’s Acquisition To AMD: A Look Into Various Engineering Samples & Prototypes From A Saner Era

yjfy.com has a vast collection of images of the community's PC hardware, as well as tallies of the "Top 100 Computer Hardware Collection" of its members. The site, which also posts to Twitter, has recently showcased the ATI to AMD Radeon graphics card collections and shows interesting engineering and non-public samples of older graphics cards.

AMD first acquired ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006. The acquisition began on June 24, 2006, and was completed later that year on October 25, 2006. During those months in between, ATI's research and development team was developing the HD2900XTX GPU that utilized the R600 chip. The reason for the vocabulary of the graphics cards was X2900XTX, which was due to ATI's naming scheme. This would transfer to AMD's naming rules, taking the model name HD2900XTX. At the time, the HD2900XTX offered a similar performance to the 3Dfx Voodoo5 6000.

TechPowerUp lists the following HD2900XTX models that were developed:

The R600 GPU chip was introduced, offering 64 pipelines and sixteen texture units. The clock speeds on the card maxed above 650 MHz and supported GDDR4 memory. The first known GPU to state that it had the R600 graphics chipset inside was on September 14, 2006, with ATI as the manufacturer and developer.

This could quickly signal that the chip was in development for some time before this first appearance before the company's acquisition. In October, a label showcased the "Made In China" showed signs that a card was developed for the Chinese PC marketplace offering PCBs. A few months after the completion of the ATI takeover, the label began to state that AMD was the developer and manufacturer, signaling the first introduction to AMD utilizing and developing GPUs with the R600 chip. In February of the following year, the last known labels for the HD2900XTX with the AMD label and R600 chipset were seen before ending the use of the chipset.

There were also unreleased prototypes, sometimes called "engineering samples," that were part of the series:

Below is a summary of the various cards, mainly the engineering samples and the R600 chipset's transition from ATI to AMD.

Some graphics cards from ATI, such as a few pictures in the gallery above, made it onto eBay once news of AMD purchasing the company. It was believed that employees working for ATI were responsible for the listing, especially once the listing mysteriously was canceled. On March 20, 2007, AMD announced the relevant specifications of the R600 chip graphics card at CeBIT 2007.

It was not until May 2007 that AMD dropped the "X" at the beginning of its graphics card series naming and released the Radeon HD 2000 XTX series. This series comprised three cards, the Radeon HD 2900 XTX, Radeon HD 2600 XTX, and Radeon HD 2400 XTX. A design issue with the frequency of the R600 chipset also affected efficiency, so the company released the HD 2900 XT as the first of the new series on the market.

Early graphics cards made with the R600 GPU chip by ATI used high-density heat sinks, while later variants before AMD purchasing the company used lower-density heat sinks, and late R600 chip graphics cards used low-density heat sinks. Once AMD stepped in, their HD 2900 XTX graphics cards returned to the higher-density heat sink design, especially with its high-frequency variants.

February 15, 2007, marked the first official word from AMD that the R600 chipset would be renamed the Radeon X2900 series. From there, AMD continued basing its designs off the R600 chipset, eventually evolving into the current Zen 4 architecture we see today.

News Source: YJFY.com