ATARI JAGUAR an IBM AANIMAL
 -- By Junko Yoshida,
    "Electronic Engineering Times", July 5, 1993
    Copyright 1993 by CMP Publications Inc.  All rights reserved. 
 
Sunnyvale, Calif -- Atari Corp. will score a new level of 
videogame performance this fall with the introduction of Jaguar, a 
64-bit RISC-based system offering realtime 3-D shaded surfaces 
with texture mapping.
 
 The $200 system, able to tap into the growing network of 
cable and telephone video services, will take videogames into a 
graphics realm once the province of midrange 3-D workstations. In 
yet a further departure, the system will be built by IBM Corp.
 
 Jaguar, billed as an interactive multimedia system, is based 
on an Atari-designed proprietary 64-bit RISC processor and its 
proprietary digital signal processors. The cartridge-based system 
features 24-bit true color graphics, shaded 3-D polygons and 
realtime texture mapping.
 
 Atari claims that Jaguar offers four times the processing 
power of the current 16-bit videogames form Sega and Nintendo, and 
believes it is even more powerful than the coming 32-bit ARM CPU-
based machine from 3DO Co. "If a spaceship goes around a moon, or 
a person walking on a street turns on the next corner, every 
object, every detail in such scenes is reproduced in shaded 3-D 
images with texture. It's truly amazing stuff," said Atari 
president Sam Tramiel.

Dense ASICs
 
The system's graphics performance is compared by the company to 
that of the 3-D engines in midrange Unix workstations. And like 
those engines, Jaguar is based on advanced, very dense digital 
ASICs.
 
 Jaguar's core consists of two chip sets, one holding the 64-
bit RISC processor and the other containing DSP hardware. "But the 
partitioning between the two chip sets is ambiguous," said Richard 
Miller, vice president of research and development at Atari, as 
the two share some functions. The two sets apparently pack a whole 
range of components, including controllers, video processors and 
encoders, leaving outside the core only "a very small amount of 
TTLs and DRAMs," said Miller. They were designed at an Atari 
facility in England, said Tramiel.
 
 The 64-bit RISC processor is capable of processing video data 
at a high rate, handling various video effects as well as full-
motion video compression on its own, Miller claimed.

Lots of bandwidth
 
Atari would not disclose any more about the core ASICs, such as 
gate counts or data bandwidth, but Miller pointed out that Atari 
engineers had to concentrate most of their design efforts on bus 
bandwidth. "Graphics eats a lot of bus bandwidth. What's available 
today for other 64-bit processors such as PowerPC is only just 
enough for what we want to do," he said. "What we designed is 
right up on the level of expensive 64-bit processors."
 
 To meet its cost goals, Atari had to push ASIC technology to 
the limit. The chip sets will be manufactured by "one of the top 
four silicon vendors in the world" using the "smallest geometry" 
available, said Miller. It is believed that with Jaguar Atari has 
become one of the early customers for a major Japanese 0.5-micron 
ASIC process, but the company would not confirm this.
 
 Clearly, manufacturing volume is essential to the Jaguar 
plan. The company intends to introduce an add-on PC card featuring 
the company's proprietary 64-bit RISC processor, said Tramiel. "It 
could also help minimize the cost of our chip sets," he said.
 
 Atari is also considering licensing the chip set to other 
silicon vendors, but has not determined any details yet, said 
Tramiel.
 
 The future holds more integration. But before working on the 
ultimate, a system on a chip, the next step for Atari's 
engineering team is to shrink what is currently a set of rather 
large custom chips further, reducing the whole system to "one 
processor, one DRAM, one ROM and one custom chip, " said Miller. 
The company is looking at both synchronous DRAMs and Rambus DRAMs 
for future use, "but we are waiting to see some of the standards 
issues get settled first," he noted.
 
 Miller does have a technological wish list. "First," he said, 
"we'd love to have 0.3-micron process technology as soon as 
possible for custom ICs. Second, we'd like to see some form of 
synchronous DRAMs appear as a standard commodity DRAM, and, 
naturally, a very high bus bandwidth to produce higher video 
performance. The existing improvements for faster bus interfaces 
so far have been very disappointing for us. Lastly, I'd love to 
play the Atari Jaguar system on a 10 x 10-foot display. I'm 
waiting for a very low cost, low power, large-screen-size display, 
using probably not an active matrix but FED-type technology."
 
 In the long run, Jaguar is designed not just as a cartridge- 
based game machine. It will use a 32-bit expansion port to connect 
to cable and telephone networks, and a digital signal processing 
port for modem usage and connection to digital audio peripherals.
 
 This I/O structure reflects Time Warner's 25 percent stake in 
Atari. "In the course of our product development, we've had 
frequent discussions with Time Warner. It has set the direction 
for our machine to have cable and telephone connections," said 
Leonard Tramiel, vice president of operating systems.
 
 The company designed and built a 16-bit prototype home-
entertainment machine two years ago, said Sam Tramiel, but 
scrapped the plan in favor of a grand attempt to leapfrog the 16-
bit systems that were then coming onto the market. But when Atari 
engineers stated to look for enabling technology, "there were no 
RISC processors and no DSPs that fulfilled our requirements, 
especially at our cost," said Miller. Atari's design team even had 
to develop its own HDL simulation tools, he said.
 
 "People tend to forget that, unlike business users, consumers 
do have much higher expectations in video quality, speed and 
cost," Miller said. "In order to match that demand, we had to 
really push the technological envelope, driving the chip counts 
down, designing the system to be highly manufacturable and 
depending on the smallest geometry process technology."

IBM the OEM
 
Atari will also push the envelope in another way, turning its back 
on traditional East Asian manufacturing sites and calling on IBM 
to build Jaguar. IBM, working with a 30-month contract worth $500 
million, will be responsible for component sourcing, quality 
testing, console assembly, packaging and distribution, and will 
build the system at its Charlotte, N.C. facility. The motherboard 
will come from an IBM-approved manufacturer, said Herbert Watkins, 
director of application solutions manufacturing at IBM Charlotte.
 
 For IBM, producing the Atari Jaguar system makes it for the 
first time a major OEM for highly cost-competitive, mass consumer-
electronics products, Watkins noted.
 
 "To manufacture one of the most sophisticated game machines 
in the world, we needed someone who understood a high-volume, fast 
digital machine," said Miller. "IBM was a natural choice."
 
 According to IBM, the prototypes of the Atari Jaguar system 
will come out in July, ramp-up models in August and mass-
production versions in September. The system will be available 
first on a limited basis in the fall in the New York and San 
Francisco areas. A national rollout is scheduled for next year. 
 
 -- Additional reporting by Roger Woolnough.



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