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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flashbacck - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Whoever decided those acronyms were necessary should be fired.fzkl - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Like mentioned, the obvious great benefit of having low power x86 chips on mobile phones is the software aspect. PC applications can now run on phones reducing aspirin needs for developers. However, what does this mean in terms of security? Can we see mobile phones needing frequent patches, antivirus, firewalls like in the case of desktops?If this were to be the case we would have successfully made a simple device like the mobile phone(in usage terms) a high maintenance product which a layman might have trouble with.
sheh - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
x86 doesn't imply any OS or API. Linux, which is commonly used today on all kinds of devices, can work just as well on x86. Conversely, nothing prevents virus writers from writing viruses for Linux running phones.beyoku - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
what happened? Was this article recelty pulled off or something?NDA???
Guuts - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Looks to me like he's trying to get the images working...erwos - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Fusion looks like it'll be a fantastic chip for UMPCs and laptops. Hopefully they'll manage to squeeze more than CPU one core on there, too. Bobcat looks similarly fun - x86 phones! VIA was also discussing this idea, and I could really go for it.That said, AMD is really under-delivering with Barcelona - I suspect the next few years will be pretty rough. Intel has set a low ceiling price for the Barcelonas ($270 - same as the Q6600), and that's not going to be good for AMD's margins.
mlau - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Embedded is ruled by ARM, Freescale, mips and sh derivates; amd and intel are going to have a tough time getting a super-ugly system like pc-x86 (with it's
legacy baggages "bios", "acpi" [you know, the stuff windows requires to run], ...) into that space.
Spoelie - Friday, July 27, 2007 - link
you do not need to have those things to run an x86 cpuloot at EFI for example, in use by apple on their x86 based macs = no more bios.
qpwoei - Sunday, July 29, 2007 - link
The real problem with x86 is that it's inherently not power efficient. To get good x86 performance requires lots of transistors and lots of power due to complex decoders and schedulers. A much simpler architecture like ARM requires very few transistors to run efficiently (at the expense of slightly less compact executable code), and is much more suited for battery-powered devices.Not to say that there won't be x86-powered devices in the future, just that I don't expect them to really gain much of a foothold in any place where battery life is important (eg: phones).
ss284 - Thursday, July 26, 2007 - link
Return of the Jedi