The Canadian chipmaker behind the graphics in the GameCube, Wii and Xbox 360
Founded in 1985 in Markham, Ontario, ATI Technologies grew from making graphics cards for IBM and Commodore into one of the two giants of PC graphics alongside Nvidia. It also drew the pictures on three famous game consoles, before AMD bought it for $5.6 billion and eventually retired the name.
Kwok Yuen Ho, together with Lee Ka Lau, Benny Lau and Francis Lau, started the business as Array Technology Incorporated. Like many chip firms it was fabless, designing products in-house while outsourcing manufacturing. By 1987 it sold its own EGA Wonder and VGA Wonder cards, and in the early 1990s its Mach chips let graphics be handled without leaning on the main processor. ATI went public in 1993 on NASDAQ and the Toronto Stock Exchange.
A string of inventive products followed. The Rage chips combined 2D and 3D acceleration, offering an alternative to 3dfx's 3D-only Voodoo cards. The All-in-Wonder cards of 1996 merged a graphics chip with a TV tuner and were the first to show computer graphics on a TV set, and that same year ATI brought 3D graphics to laptops. In 2000 it launched Radeon, its flagship line against Nvidia's GeForce, and when 3dfx collapsed that year the two rivals were left dominating the market. ATI even promoted its chips with Ruby, an animated mercenary heroine shown at trade fairs.
Consoles gave ATI a place in living rooms. Buying ArtX in 2000 brought the team behind the GameCube's Flipper graphics chip, and ATI built a modified version, codenamed Hollywood, for the Wii. Microsoft hired it to design the Xenos graphics core for the Xbox 360.
On July 24, 2006, AMD announced it would buy ATI, closing the deal on October 25, 2006. The purchase fed AMD's Fusion processors, which put general computing and graphics on one chip and became popular in cheaper computers. On August 30, 2010, AMD announced it would drop the ATI brand, and Radeon cards have carried AMD's name ever since.
Source: ATI Technologies
