ArtX

~ the last words ~

The GameCube reached Europe on 3 May 2002, when I was eighteen and spending most afternoons in internet cafes in Turkey, where every screen was a PC running Counter-Strike on whatever card the cafe owner had bought in bulk. The purple cube was a thing I knew about from magazines. The chip inside it was designed by a company that existed for twenty-nine months and never put its name on anything you could buy.

ArtX was founded in September 1997 in Palo Alto by twenty people who had just walked out of Silicon Graphics, led by Wei Yen and David Orton. Yen's previous job is the whole explanation: he had run SGI's Nintendo Operations and Project Reality, the effort that between 1993 and 1996 shrank an SGI supercomputer architecture down to something that would fit in a Nintendo 64. Howard Lincoln, then chairman of Nintendo of America, later described him from a stage as the man primarily responsible for the N64 graphics chip, and the group around him as one of the best teams of 3D graphics engineers on the planet.

SGI did not take the departure gracefully. Late in 1997 it filed a non-compete suit alleging the ex-employees would use its trade secrets, and then dropped the case in May 1998 without prejudice, with no money changing hands and no blame assigned either way. The Register's account adds the detail that gives the suit its shape: Nintendo announced it would use ArtX technology in its next console during the same week SGI said it had killed the lawsuit.

~ the record ~

~ what nintendo actually bought ~

The contract signed in May 1998 was for the complete system logic and the graphics processor of a machine then codenamed Dolphin, renamed GameCube at a press conference in Japan on 25 August 2000. ArtX called the graphics part Flipper. In the shipped console it ran at 162 MHz against an IBM Gekko processor at 486 MHz, with 24 MB of 1T-SRAM as system memory and 3 MB more of it on the graphics side. A separate 16 MB of plain DRAM buffered input and output.

The sequence matters for who gets the credit. English Wikipedia's GameCube article states that the Flipper design was mostly finished by ArtX before ATI arrived and was not overtly influenced by ATI afterwards. Greg Buchner, one of the ArtX founders, described their portion as having arced from inception in 1998 to completion in 2000. The console launched in Japan on 14 September 2001 with about 500,000 units shipped to retailers, and in North America on 18 November with over 700,000.

~ the chip nobody remembers ~

ArtX did ship something into the PC market, and almost nobody noticed. At COMDEX in the fall of 1999 it demonstrated an integrated graphics chipset with a geometry engine built in, and that design went into the Aladdin 7 northbridge sold by the Taiwanese chipset house ALi. The press release ALi put out on 8 November 1999 promises a two to three times performance improvement for K6 and other Socket 7 processors, which tells you the target: the low end of a platform that was already obsolete. The Register noted ArtX's ties to Matsushita and to Acer, ALi's parent group.

~ sold before the console shipped ~

ATI announced the purchase on 16 February 2000 for about $400 million, and The Register was explicit about the structure two weeks later: no cash changed hands, ATI swapped ArtX stock for four hundred million dollars' worth of its own shares. Wei Yen joined ATI's board immediately and David Orton became ATI's president and chief operating officer. An ATI spokesperson summarized the point of the exercise in one line, that ATI now became a major supplier to the game console market via Nintendo. Hiroshi Yamauchi of Nintendo publicly blessed the arrangement, which mattered, since his console was nineteen months from launch with its graphics chip inside somebody else's company.

The closing date is the one thing here I cannot pin down. Wikipedia's ArtX article says February 2000 and its GameCube article says April 2000, and no filing I could reach settles it. The grave is filed at month precision on the announcement for that reason.

~ the inheritance ~

ATI's console business dates from this purchase. It went on to supply the Xbox 360 and then the Wii, by which point AMD had bought the whole company, in October 2006. Wikipedia also claims ArtX's work laid the foundation for the R300, the chip that shipped in 2002 as the Radeon 9700 and carried ATI through its best years, though the only citation offered for that is an article from February 2000, which cannot support it.

artx.com belongs to an online art platform now, which is a reasonable use of four letters. The company that held it designed one chip for Nintendo and was absorbed before a single unit of the console reached a shop.

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