AMD - Changing The World As We Know It At CeBIT
Today, at CeBIT, AMD is changing the world. While they aren't breaking any record in the CPU or video card market, they are coming up with something a lot of people need, but only a few dare to dream about - a platform with integrated graphics that actually allows you to play games, and when I say "games", I am thinking about much more than Solitaire, NFS Porsche or any other game that was great...almost a decade ago!
First, the promises - new Catalyst drivers are going to be released on a monthly basis (so far, so good), and the first two 45nm processors are going to arrive in the second half of the year, hopefully in summer, and not around Christmas.
According to what we know, these two processors are going to be the Shanghao chip for servers, and the Deneb desktop processor. Obviously, these are only codenames for now, so the final products may have different names. The good part is that, according to AMD's Garry Silcott, a "select list" of customers already have received samples, so let's hope for the better...
...but the better is already here, as the best integrated graphics solution available at this time, exactly as I mentioned in the opening part of this article!
What we have here is the 780 chipset, which features an integrated R620 core with DirectX 10.1 support, UVD and Hybrid Graphics, and if everything works as planned, the 780 could kill ATI's entry-level discrete graphics cards. Why? Well, according to AMD, the $19 chipset performs as well as the $50 low-end cards, in terms of graphics performance, so...why spend more when you can get the same for less money?
If we look at the entire deal from another angle, AMD's new chipset may simply wipe out Intel and NVIDIA from the integrated graphics market, so competing with its own low-end graphics card won't hurt them much, after all.
Now, the cherry on top of the cake - benchmark results! Compared to Intel's G35, the 780G(the faster version of the 780 chipset) reached twice the 3DMark06 score, was three times faster in 3DMark05, while announced frame rates (using a Phenom processor, of course) are these: 27 fps under Crysis, 43 fps under Call of Duty 4, 40 fps under Half-Life 2 and 35 fps under Doom 3, all using the 1024X768 resolution.
I'll stop here now, but I am sure we'll get more inside news in the coming days, and since there's a lot to talk about the topics above, you can subscribe to our news by email, so you won't miss a thing, because we won't miss a thing, for sure!
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