The ATI R7XX

Most of today's announcements were CPU/platform related, however AMD did drop a few nuggets about its 2008 GPU line: the R7xx series.

The R7xx GPU will be built on a 55nm process and it appears that, at least on the high-end, there won't be any UVD support. AMD's roadmaps clearly outline UVD as a part of the mainstream R7xx feature set, but the high end platforms are completely missing the checkbox. We'll find out next year for sure if the lack of UVD and Purevideo HD on high end parts will continue.

We can't say much more about R7xx, other than AMD is quite confident in its abilities despite the lackluster reception of the R600. AMD has its reasons...



AMD's Bob Drebin (CTO of the Graphics Products Group), reaffirmed the company's commitment to developing faster discrete GPUs, even in a post-Fusion era. Drebin stated that memory bandwidth and processing needs would keep discrete GPUs a part of the market; Fusion CPUs will simply bring more opportunities to the low cost and mainstream markets, while discrete GPUs will continue to flourish in the rest of the market.

What will continue to be the driving factors in discrete GPU development going forward? According to Drebin, memory bandwidth will still need to go up and at the same time, there's no shortage of a need for wider/faster GPUs.

The Demo: Phenom at 3.0GHz, Today Final Words
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  • kilkennycat - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    Highly likely that nVidia will solve this problem at both high and low end with their next family of GPUs. Stay tuned for the end of 2007. The first part out of the chute is also likely not to be the highest end but that which replaces the 8800GTS at a price close to $200 with full HD hardware decode... nVidia is very well aware of the cost-performance hole left by both AMD/ATI and themselves in their current GPU line.
  • strikeback03 - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    with that Phenom demo box, I think they have finally found use for a 1000W+ power supply
  • Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    Given the size of the heatsink on the cpu, I'd venture power consumption is inline with other engineering samples, 120w or less max TDP
  • Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    Oh my bad, you're right when taking the three 2900XTs in consideration.

    Where's my edit button :(
  • Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    At least 2 times in the article, the text builds up anticipation for a graph, but it never comes, the most telling example is on page 6, but one or two pages before it it happened also. Both graphs are supposed to be from Intel.
  • Justin Case - Monday, August 13, 2007 - link

    Exactly. They say "Two years ago Intel used the following chart to illustrate the need for multi-core CPUs", and then the image is an AMD slide, not an Intel graph.
  • Omega215D - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link

    If they plan to integrate an on die PCIe controller on the CPU how would this affect overclocking?
  • Regs - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link

    I'd imagine just like how it was when AMD intergrated the memory controller, mobo makers will just have to add more bios options.
  • yacoub - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link

    While paging through the article, the thing that stood out most to me was the AMD graphic on page 5 supposedly demonstrating how much more performance Bulldozer is going to offer without a single number on the graph. I guess they want us to measure its performance increases in pixels. hehe :)
  • LTG - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link

    Anand you're really good at distilling out the bottom line from massive amounts of marketing talk and slide ware.

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