AMD's 890GX Chipset - Same Graphics, Better South Bridge
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 2, 2010 4:36 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Integrated Gigabit Ethernet MAC
The SB850 includes a new integrated Gigabit Ethernet MAC. However, unless I’m reading this incorrectly both the ASUS and Gigabyte boards I’ve seen thus far still rely on external Realtek RTL8111 series single chip MAC/PHY solutions.
| Windows File Copy from NAS to SSD | AMD 890GX | Intel H55 |
| Peak Bandwidth | 952 Mbps | 952 Mbps |
Performance is as expected - transfer rates approach 1000Mbps regardless of platform. I don’t believe these boards are using AMD’s integrated MAC though.
Final Words
At this point there’s not much to say about AMD’s 890GX. With no improvement in graphics performance, no die shrink and no new audio/video features today’s launch is really about the SB850 South Bridge.
Native 6Gbps SATA support is an impressive move by AMD. Unfortunately I’m not totally sold on AMD’s SATA controller. Compared to the SB750, the new SB850 appears to be a step forward. However, even the new south bridge isn’t as fast as Intel’s I/O controllers when it comes to peak performance with a high end SSD. With standard hard drives and even slow SSDs I doubt there’s much cause for concern, but as SSDs become more commonplace we’re going to see controller deficiencies exposed more readily. I had hoped for a bigger reset in south bridge performance with the 890GX/SB850 combo. Perhaps it’ll take a few more BIOS/driver revisions before we get there. Update: We're getting closer!
While I would have liked to have seen native USB 3 support as well, at least AMD is willing to provide enough bandwidth to feed any external USB 3 controllers at this point. It’s more of a theoretical advantage than anything else today, but it’s worth giving credit for.
I get the distinct feeling that there just wasn’t much effort put into 890GX. The real focus for AMD has been Llano and making sure that chip has the sort of significant improvement in graphics performance that we’ve been waiting for. Until then, it looks like we’ll get a model number update with few new features. In a sense, AMD has finally taken a page out of Intel’s chipset playbook.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
65 Comments
View All Comments
Taft12 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Fully agreed here, the lack of chipset competition has led to stagnation on both the AMD and Intel sides of the fence.Especially Intel, Anand admitted in the H55 coverage that Intel did not reduce chipset pricing even though removal of the IGP reduced their costs significantly. This horseshit would not occur if Nvidia and others weren't being blocked from creating their own offerings.
Penti - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
They don't have licenses to produce chipsets any more. I fully disagree that it has led to stagnation though. Removing the memory controller on AMDs didn't lower the cost either. Both AMD and Intel finally has some enterprise (business) features such DASH and vpro too. Others simply couldn't keep up, nVidia killed ULI when they bought them, SiS and VIA has dropped out since a long time ago. Gaming components like nVidia 980a won't do a dent regardless of price.MadMan007 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Hey Anand, thanks for including a modern low-end card for reference. I do have a request for what might be a useful article wrt IGPs for you. I'd like to know not how poor IGPs are compared to modern cards but rather to which *older* graphics card they are equivalent. Personally I haven't gotten many new games in a while and with Steam sales have been picking up some older ones too, there may be others in the same boat. Now when a game says it requires a much older card like a GF3 or Radeon 9000 or what have you I am pretty sure a modern IGP is better but once things start getting in to DX9 cards I'm not so sure. Would an IGP be equivalent to a 6600GT, or a Radeon 850?If you were to have someone do an article looking at this with older games that would be awesome and a great service to those who just play older games at this point. Finding IGP performance on older games is not easy.
nice123 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Remember, GlobalFoundries is new. AMD are still using TSMC's 55nm process for this chipset. This is most probably because their 40nm process is absolutely crap. (as seen with the Radeon 5xxx yields and lack of Fermi)When AMD move to GlobalFoundries I think their hardware will pick up more, we won't have TSMC screwing up every single process they do.
Penti - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Still? What are you talking about, practically nobody uses the latest node for chipsets and many other none bleeding edge speed ASICs. At least they moved from 65nm. Intel chipsets are manufactured at 65nm.They won't move to GlobalFoundries for fabbing chipset/GPU logic till Liano APUs I guess they will design chipsets for GF then too.
Foxi - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
AMD should ban Anand from testing theirs stuffs. It's a shame and pathetic as well. :sstrikeback03 - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
lol, which part of this article offended you, fanboi?Penti - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
How about the IOMMU (AMD-Vi) support in the SB850 chipset? It's supported right? I want to know if the chipset and bios combo has it working.semo - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Wondering about that too. I've seen articles here test for virtualization performance but only in the server space. Would be good to see more info about these sort of things around herePenti - Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - link
Yeah it works for SR5650-70-90/SP5100 server chipset, but it's not identical even if it's the chip it's based of. So I was wondering if there's really support in the silicon and perhaps more important if it's supported in the BIOS. Otherwise it's not really interesting for me. I will still only consider the Opteron platform for an AMD machine then and it makes choosing a Intel machine so much easier. But I guess not since AMD don't mention it. Might not matter for desktops, but it do for workstations and Intel desktops supports it (IOMMU). AMD-V is of course there but that's a whole other matter.