Completing its transformation from a specialist chip maker into a personal computer support chip maker, Weitek Corp, Sunnyvale, California, has announced chip sets with integrated system memory and graphics accelerators, the first company to do so, it claims. For the company, the W464 and W564 Unified System/Display Controllers, are more than just a mark of its ability to get its technology out there first, but given the losses Weitek has experienced over the last four years, they are seen as the products that will push it back into profit. But they won’t ship until the end of the year so it’s unlikely that this year’s figures will benefit from them. The race to merge system memory and graphics has been on for a considerable time, ever since manufacturers realised 16M-bit memory chips had insufficient bandwidth for graphics and that whacking more memory into a personal computer put the cost beyond what most consumers are willing to pay. The W464 and W564 Unified System/Display Controllers integrate PCI system logic with a 64-bit graphical user interface accelerator, combining the graphics frame-buffer and main memory into a single 64 bit-wide memory subsystem. This unified memory architecture, which eliminates the separate graphics-frame buffer and a separate 64-bit graphics controller, should mean cheaper personal computers. The W464 set includes a full PCI logic implementation for all 80486 processors as well as the Cyrix M1-SC. It also incorporates the company’s fourth generation high performance 64-bit Dynamic RAM-based graphical user interface accelerator with an integrated 135MHz RAMDAC. Pricing for the chip set is $43.50 in quantities of 10,000. Samples of the W464 chip set are available now. The W564 set incorporates PCI support for Pentium-class chips: performance enhancements for the W564 include video acceleration technology as well as local bus EIDE support and Extended Data Out Dynamic RAM support. First parts are scheduled to be ready later this year.
