During a recent visit to Toronto and ATI's HQ, Beyond3D got the opportunity to sit down with the man who's been steering ATI for the past few years, soon-to-be-positioned CEO, Dave Orton. Through the interview they discuss how ATI is now organised, how focused it is on the desktop market and chat about their latest line of graphics chips.

In comparison to NV40 do you think you undershot the expectations for die size this time around, or do you feel that larger die sizes than R420 are not really feasible at this point in time?
We focused on performance, schedule, features and cost. Our trade-off was that we wanted to maintain our performance leadership and hit a die size that we felt could be produced in volume. ATI is very confident that we picked the best path for the enthusiast market in 2004.

On a related note, Neowin is currently covering WinHec 2004, weblog style. This morning they reported on Dave Orton's keynote presenting the X800 graphics series, Valve's Gabe Newell stole the whole show though...

The Ruby demo has been released onto CD for attendees to view and see the effects that the X800 can render in real time. The demo was very impressive but was not a touch on the demo by Gabe Newell from Valve. This stole the whole keynote to actually see some new footage from Half Life 2. Again we got the whole video which is approximately 3 minutes long and as soon as we find somewhere with firewire we’ll get it on here asap because it’s one to watch! Gabe claimed the X800 is 40% faster than the GeForce 6800 for Half Life 2 and confirmed that we’ll see Half Life 2 this summer.