Eyeing NVIDIA's Lunch: AMD's New Chipsets
Details were scarce about the upcoming RS700 chipset other than the fact it will support DX10 graphics capabilities and include support for HT 3.0, PCI-E GenII, 45nm CPUs, and Avivo HD. This chipset will replace the somewhat successful AMD 690g/V in the low end market in the middle part of next year.
With new CPUs come new chipsets, and thankfully this part of the discussion will happen in the near term. By the end of this year, AMD will introduce its RD790 chipset, which AMD hopes will be competitive with NVIDIA's Socket-AM2 solutions.
The RD790 will obviously support Phenom, but it will also support what AMD is calling CrossFire 2.0. This enhanced multi-GPU spec will support up to four GPUs working in tandem, although we're not clear what GPUs will be supported in this mode or when. Not to mention whether or not we'll run into the same problems we did with NVIDIA's Quad-SLI and performance.
PCI Express 2.0 will also be supported by the RD790 chipset, which doubles bandwidth and dramatically reduces latency to PCIe 2.0 compliant devices. Backwards compatibility with PCIe 1.0 devices is maintained. The chipset will support 32 lanes for graphics (either in 4 x8 slots or 2 x16 slots), 6 x1 lanes for expansion and a single x4 lane to connect to the South Bridge.
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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 supplySpoelie - 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 TDPSpoelie - 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.