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After two years of being “a card company” and “a chip company” at the same time, ATI Technologies reportedly decided to totally withdraw itself from graphics cards business and concentrate fully on selling its VPUs to Add-In-Board partners.

A web-site said today that an unidentified source from ATI Technologies told them that the company will change its strategy; as a consequence, the company will cease to market its graphics cards and will fully dedicate itself to VPU development and selling. It means that we will not see any “Built by ATI” graphics cards on the market, but there will be more solutions by companies like Sapphire, TYAN, Gigabyte, Club3D, Power Color, Hercules and so on.

In order to ensure the highest possible quality after the launch of higher-end products, ATI Technologies will outsource the manufacturing of such solutions to its current partner (PC Partner, the owner of Sapphire) and control the quality itself. Such products will still be marketed under different brand-names. The only consumer solutions to be sold under ATI’s own brand-name are ALL-IN-WONDER multimedia graphics cards.

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News source: xBit Labs

TCP breaks down large files into small packets of about 1500 bytes, each carrying the address of the sender and the recipient. The sending computer transmits a packet, waits for a signal from the recipient that acknowledges its safe arrival, and then sends the next packet.

If no receipt comes back, the sender transmits the same packet at half the speed of the previous one, and repeats the process, getting slower each time, until it succeeds.

This means that even minor glitches on the line can make a connection very sluggish. Because Fast TCP uses the same packet sizes as regular TCP, the hardware that carries messages around the net will still work. The difference is in software and hardware on the sending computer, which continually measures the time it takes for sent packets to arrive, and how long acknowledgements take to come back.

This reveals the delays on the line, giving early warnings of likely packet losses. The Fast TCP software uses this to predict the highest data rate the connection can support without losing data.

Since the packets are the same size as those used in TCP, none of the equipment along the internet itself will have to be modified, and no new hardware will be needed on computers receiving the data.

The first practical test of Fast TCP took place in November at a supercomputing conference. Researchers from Caltech, Stanford and CERN near Geneva in Switzerland, sent data 10,000 kilometres from Sunnyvale, California, to CERN at an average rate of 925 megabits per second. Ordinary TCP managed just 266 megabits per second on the same routes.

By ganging 10 Fast TCP systems together, the researchers have achieved transmission speeds of over 8.6 gigabits per second, which is more than 6000 times the capacity of ordinary broadband links.