The Graphics Update

There's nothing new about GPU architectures, but here's the short recap. GPU revenues are understandably up since last year:


Market share has gone up as well:


If you want to look at console + PC market share, AMD's GPUs look very good thanks to the Wii and Xbox 360, but this is stretching it a bit:


On December 10 AMD will release Catalyst 8.12, and alongside the normal driver updates AMD will be releasing its own GPU-accelerated H.264 transcoder. The AVIVO Video Converter (AVC) is AMD's own Badaboom-like application but for Radeon GPUs, which AMD promises will be much faster.

I'm trying to get my hands on a copy and as soon as I do I'll work on a head-to-head with the latest version of Badaboom.

45nm Phenom? It's called the Phenom II and you get it Next Year The Foundry Update
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  • hechacker1 - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    The iphone/ipod touch has a h.264 decoding chip. The main reason for support is battery life and higher quality for a given file size. it also uses YouTube's h.264 videos (a.k.a high quality videos).

    The iphone supports 640x352 maximum (I encoded for the maximum target). The screen is 480x320.
  • JarredWalton - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link

    Ah... targeting 640x352 is a huge difference from 1920x1080. I'm not positive on this, but I'm pretty sure encoding times scale linearly with resolution under H.264. So, based on that, 1080P encoding would require 9.20 times longer than 640x352 encoding. It may not be *exactly* nine times longer - depending on quality settings among other things - but for sure the higher resolution encode is more processor intensive.
  • overzealot - Saturday, November 15, 2008 - link

    My experience with h264 encoding follows your theory, fairly linear increase in encode time.
    It's worth noting that Nero AVC quality is quite average. It is to h264 what xing was to mp3 encoding. It gets the job done fast, but at what cost?
  • Agitated - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    I may have missed this since I'm reading the article on a blackberry but was there any mention of them throwing out an am2 socket 45nm quad core opteron?
  • pugster - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    Today they can scrap up something to compete with the Intel Atom processor but they didn't. Even ARM is doing it. I guess they don't get the hint.
  • teldar - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    I don't think they have the development budget for ANYTHING right now that's not going to make some real money. Even Intel SAYS they aren't making as much because ATOM is taking sales away from higher margin parts.
    That's really not a market segment AMD can get into right now. Maybe if they make some money for a few quarters... But I'll believe all this when I see it.

    T
  • Griswold - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link

    Humm no, Intel never said that. Its just a theorie that didnt show up in hard numbers in their reports yet (albeit, its a theory that isnt too far stretched).
  • R3MF - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    A netbook format, but not using the fusion CPU/GPU single package, i wonder what it is............

    low-power dual-core Phenom II at .045u and probably around 1.6GHz
    low-power 780G chipset at .055u, hopefully paired with the SB750

    Could be a very compelling product when put in a 10" chassis!
  • 3DoubleD - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    I'd put my money on downclocked, super low voltage dual core athlons. It was demonstrated not so long ago that such an Athlon chip running below 10 Watts wipes the floor with the Intel Atom. Personally, I don't buy into the whole netbook thing, but I think this is the right way to go for AMD. I feel like I pioneered the idea when I assembled a 12.1" laptop (from a barebones kit) with the slowest (eg. lowest power components) available ~4 years ago. I was able to get ~7 hours of battery life at only ~4lbs. Having said that, I would not trade any more performance for power savings if I did it again. Getting any smaller than 12.1 inches is also crazy unless you are planning to only use it for web surfing. I don't see the allure of paying all that money for something that just browses the web. I understand the desire to bring a laptop everywhere, but it should be useful, that's why I think the super low power X2 Athlon would be a good call.

    On that note, I don't think that Phenom can be low power enough to suit their needs. AMD is really really good at making Athlons, which is why they can run so low power.
  • teldar - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    I would love to have something similar to the eee but actaully with a little bit of power. But that's me as a student right now. It would be nice to be able to pull up the prof's power points during class and add notes by typing rather than writing. And it would let me get some other things done while sitting in class when there's not a whole lot of info being disbursed.

    But it would be nice as well if it could get a couple things done at the same time. Not an option with the atom netbooks.

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