Interview (2) December 1999, with Quantum3D- Kevin Payne
How many VSA-100s will
you be putting on one card and how much ram?
[Kevin Payne] Up
to 8 on a board, with up to 64mb per chip.
What will the cost of
this be?
[Kevin Payne] Not
yet announced but the product family, which starts with AAlchemy3 (based on
Voodoo3) will start at $9999.
Can you give us some specs
on your graphic card?
[Kevin Payne] Thus
far, only what is available on the website in the press release.
Do you have any benchmarks
?
[Kevin Payne] No
published benchmarks yet. Expect us to publish RealWorld benchmark numbers
soon.
Why aren't you going full
throttle and stacking a huge board with 32 chips and around 2 gigs of ram?
[Kevin Payne]
a) huge board is hard
to fit in a PC enclosure
b) the heat would be phenomenal
c) the power requirement
would be problematic
d) most important: higher
demand for the other products means we focus our resources on those first
Most of the above could
be solved I would think. Market demand is the most important factor...the
rest is a science project.
Can you give us some specs
on the AALchemy system?
[Kevin Payne] The
"system" that will be called AAlchemy will *officially* be a Heavy Metal GX+
AAlchemy. Heavy Metal is the system that will support the AAlchemy graphics
subsystem. There's info on Heavy Metal GX+ on our website. It includes 2 Pentium
III CPUs, etc. A PDF of the new Heavy Metal brochure should be on-line very
shortly. This new brochure includes info on AAlchemy and updated specs.
Can you give us some product
shots ?
[Kevin Payne] This
is the board based on Voodoo3. It is simular to our current Mercury product
in terms of capabilities but it offers some new features including increased
resolution. AAlchemy4 will be based on VSA-100.
Unfortunately the marking is not
seen but if that is an AGP-to-AGP bridge, then it means that each Voodoo3
chip can "feed" one child of its kind ?
[Kevin
Payne] No, They work in parallel.
The board presented on the photo is very odd ( Not something you see daily
) Can you tell us what the red and green LEDs are for?
[Kevin
Payne] SwapLock indicators.
Why the bracket is so short? Or it isn't short and the board itself is just
so huge?
[Kevin Payne]
It's a very big board
