| INSIDE ATI SILICON VALLEY |
Article: Joseph
Toshiro Meyerowitz The second lab they showed me was the Quality Assurance lab, and there they had even more computers with r3xx equipment being tested with the newest drivers for quality purposes, testing everything from ancient games to pre-release beta games for compatibility
They had a file cabinet full of games that they tested!
I saw a beta of the game Breed, an upcoming FPS/RTS game which you can see being tested here by one of the QA technicians, with Raja Koduri looking on, for stability and compatibility with the CATALYST driver suite. This lab was run by Jose Barba. If you look carefully at the picture below, you can see a lot of different small windows with green boxes in the two monitors: I was told that they were part of a test for multi-monitor support.
If you look closely at the next picture, you can see one of the newest and greatest cards to come from ATI – the ATI 9800 Pro 256MB graphics card
This lab was also not yet filled, given that they had only been there for a month, but they had a good set of hardware slaving away at making CATALYST drivers the best in the industry. After visiting the QA lab I walked around some of the rest of the facility, which was made up of primarily cubicles and conference rooms that I saw
Their building overlooked one of the busiest parts of Silicon Valley, and the rear of the building had a view of an entertainment park. They had one poster of the transistor layout of one of their graphics chips on one of the cubicles, which I snapped a shot of (below).
When the time for the tour ran out, we headed to the elevators. I thanked Eric and Raja for their time and effort in getting this together, especially considering how quickly it was all put together. Overall, I had only a couple of hours to visit the site, but I managed to get a pretty good look at some of the gear that really made ATI's drivers and chips some of the best in existence. Before I left, Eric mentioned to me that the new 9600 and 9800 cards were not manufactured in Santa Clara, but in Toronto, but despite not having any available onsite he would get me my very own piece of ATI technology: an ATI 9800 graphics card. This was a great suprise, and I cannot thank him enough for the new graphics card, which will be replacing an old Geforce2-MX in my computer, and for the excellently guided tour of the Santa Clara building. I would also like to thank Raja Koduri, for helping guide the tour, and David Rolson, Kai Tai, and Jose Barba for greeting me and letting me have a good look through the ATI facilities and their respective labs. It was a wonderful experience, and I would like to thank you on behalf of the Driverheaven enthusiast community for letting me share this!
Driverheaven would like to extend its thanks to ATI for allowing them to take a tour of the facilities and for the courtesy shown ! We also have a previous article inside ATI HQ - Canada
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