Investing in Workstation Graphics: PixelFusion receives $15 million in financing

Electronic News, May 10, 1999 by Peter Brown

San Jose, Calif.-Graphics chip start-up PixelFusion Ltd. has received $15 million in a second round of financing, bringing the total investment in the company to more than $23 million since its founding in 1997.

The company, based in Bristol, United Kingdom, is focused on bringing a new generation of graphics to PCs, workstations and servers. This round of funding will help the company complete the development of its initial product, dubbed the Fuzion 150 chip, targeted at workstation and server graphics. All of the funding has been garnered through private placement from companies based in the United Kingdom.

Ian Lazenby, chief executive officer at PixelFusion, said the recent round of investing demonstrates the confidence investors have in the company.

"We have developed an unbeatable technology and are on target for fourth quarter product delivery," Lazenby said.

The Fuzion 150 will arrive in time for an expected huge leap forward in workstation graphics controllers in 2001, due to the increased popularity of Intel Corp.'s IA-64 processors, according to Jon Peddie Associates, Tiburon, Calif. This will open up a wide range of opportunities not only for PixelFusion but for the other workstation graphics vendors including 3Dlabs, Evans & Sutherland, and Real3D, according to Peddie.

The Fuzion 150 is a single-chip processor that uses a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture to achieve 3 gigaFLOPS performance with 600 gigabytes per second on-chip memory bandwidth. The chip has 50 million transistors and will be produced in a 0.25-micron process. Pricing for the chip will be given at a later date.

Intel Tries Again

In other graphics chip news, Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., rolled out its second graphics accelerator, dubbed the i752, based on the company's internal graphics technology. Intel in 1998 rolled out the i740 graphics chip and was immediately shot down by new chips with superior 2D/3D engines. As a result, Intel dumped the i740 chips in Taiwan and other parts of the Far East causing a serious glut in the graphics market in the second quarter of 1998, sources said.

For its second try, Intel is touting the i752 as a complete multimedia offering for Pentium III processor-based platforms. The chip features both 2D and 3D graphics as well as digital video acceleration for mainstream PCs.

The i752 is specifically designed for the 3D and digital video demands of the Internet and today's consumer and business software applications, said Gary Thomas, general manager of Intel's Graphics Components Division. It appears Intel is not going to try and compete, at least initially, with the gaming market that is dominated by the likes of 3Dfx Interactive and Nvidia Corp., both based here.

The architecture features a pixel-precise engine that extends Intel's hyperpipelined architecture with anisotropic filters, emboss bump mapping, texture compression and texture compositing. The digital video portion of the chip supports software DVD, and a variety of input sources including VCR, camcorders, TV tuners, MPEG-2 and video streaming over the Internet.

The i752 is slated to be in production in June at a price of $19.50 in 10,000 unit quantities.

Where's Rendition?

One of the more interesting events to take place in the graphics business over the past weeks has been Micron Electronics Inc.'s decision to offer Nvidia's TNT2 graphics processors in all Micron Millennia desktop systems, the company's flagship PCs.

This may at first seem like an ordinary design win. However, Micron in 1998 acquired Rendition Inc., a small company that was to serve as an internal source for graphics chips. Now that Micron has decided to use an outside source for its graphics, the question is begged: What happened to Rendition?

Reports indicate that Rendition may be working on a graphics accelerator, but the company has been very quiet since it was acquired by Micron. Some observers believe Rendition might have lost its focus when it was acquired by the larger and more broadly-focused Micron. Those observers believe Rendition has been unable to meet the performance goals of other technologies out on the market today-namely the Riva TNT2, S3's Savage4 and ATI's Rage 128.

Some analysts thought that once Micron acquired Rendition it would then ramp up the technology to be used in its PC lines. However, this has not happened yet. Calls to Micron regarding the issue were not returned.