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ATI's Athlon 64 Chipset with Integrated Graphics
EconolineCrush writes "ATI has released the first Athlon 64 chipset with DirectX 9-class integrated graphics and PCI Express. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the Radeon Xpress 200 that highlights the chipset's impressive performance and surprisingly competent integrated graphics. It looks like the Radeon Xpress 200 could be the missing link that helps AMD crack Intel's dominance of the consumer and corporate desktop markets."
I've been waiting for some time for this. I hope I'll be able to use this with FreeBSD without resorting to half-assed proprietary drivers (like the nforce case) and getting a decent 2D image quality (something nvidia really sucks at.)
I wonder if On-Board video will ever replace the need for PCI-E and AGP for gamers. On-board audio now is good enough for most gamers, and we have on-board LAN, etc.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=88&type=exper t
ATI makes video cards. The average office has no need of a high end video platform for their desktops. This is going to appeal to geeks that make their own machine and finally have an excuse to go 64-bit.
This is great as Ive been meaning to upgrade but dont feel like shelling out $$$ for a new video card when my 5900 seems up to the task of playing most games just fine, Duke Nuke Em Forever excluded, when and if it comes out.
It looks like the Radeon Xpress 200 could be the missing link that helps AMD crack Intel's dominance of the consumer and corporate desktop markets
No, what would crack intel's dominance would be Dell carrying AMD-based computers, which Dell has refused to do. AMD has the superior product in the Athlon 64 and its just a matter of getting IT managers to put faith in AMD and not go with Dell to buy their next big purchase.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
They've already had a chip like this in the form of the nForce. Integrated graphics AND sound. This is better graphics, and newer technology, but I don't really see any magic bullet that will wow people. Just looks like a good new chipset to me.
AMD's problem in the corperate world is mostly just one of repuation. Corperations tend to like to stay with proven solutions. If something works, don't change to something else. Well, Intel works, and has for a long time, so there is inertia to stick with it.
Also AMD has a really rocky history. For a long time their processors did NOT perform up to their numbers. Also when the Athlons first came out the motherboard situation was abysmal and incompatabilities were rampant. Now granted that's been fixed, but it's easy to break trust and hard to earn it back.
Ultimately, I don't think this chipset will make any large difference. It'll be another nice chipset for AMD chips and more options when you buy one, but it's nothing earth shattering.
It looks like the Radeon Xpress 200 could be the missing link that helps AMD crack Intel's dominance of the consumer and corporate desktop markets.
First off, AMD already has cracked Intel's dominace in the consumer and corporate markets.
Secondly, it's no "missing link", it's just another chipset. Like nForce. Only from ATI.
I guess everything posted to slashdot has to be about taking down the big bad (microsoft, intel, whoever else is the bad guy ATM).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I really wish AMD would have developed the 761 further but the nForce and now ATI chipsets should provide a good stable alternative to the VIA/SiS garbage.
... which IMO are crap compared to Intel.
I just wish AMD had a motherboard manuf that was as good as Intel. Currently the stability crown seems to be passed back and forth between ASUS and MSI
I can feel some kind of electromagnetic field emanating from Fry's and pulling my credit card in that general direction...
Which GNU/Linux and especially BSD distros are ready to take advantage of the full power of the AMD hardware offerings these days?
but what REALLY matters is how will it plays HL2, right ?
Business Voyeur
I don't think that's the missing link. The missing link are the IT decision makers sitting around in their own electronic kingdom, who are the missing link(s). I've dealt with a number of them and almost all of them pick Intel above AMD, quoting obsolete (if they even were correct!) reasons (number one is stability, and secondly compability).
The only way I think this will change is by having the Big Guys pushing AMD, and have just as many AMD servers as Intel, then you can at least pin AMD's credibility on IBM et cetera.
If ATI puts out Linux MB drivers for this, I hope they're better than their graphics card drivers, but I don't hold out much hope.
NVIDIA has done an excellent job on Linux drivers for their products, so it CAN be done.
The best thing that AMD can have happen for them on the corporate front would be to get major vendors like Dell, HP, and IBM to offer their chips in their products.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Hmm...
It is a very interesting chipset. But the Nvidia Ultra 4 seems to have better SATA support.
Nvidia supports 300MB/s while ATI has 150MB/s. Also, ATI does not support Native Command Queue-ing, but Nvidia's chipset does. Nvidia also supports 0+1 RAID while ATI doesn't. They both support both RAID 0 and 1 though.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
If you want a well supported video card under Linux, do not expect anything from a recent ATI video card - go nVidia.
While ATI says they are going to support us, Real Soon Now, - actions talk, bullshit walks.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Pick and choose your poison. I am sure one or more will get /.'ed...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Anandtech also has a reveiw up. I haven't taken a real close look, but I think they actually compare performance with the ATI chipset with an early nForce4 board.
They only allow 16 PCI-E lanes for the GFX card, so if you use SLI its really only 8 PCI-E lanes per GFX Card. 22 PCE-E Lanes total, only leave you 6 for the system, sounds like you could fill that up really quick. (2 are used for the chipset?)
But I guess, even SLI on 8 PCI-E kicks AGP's ass, so I shouldn't complain. Doubt you cna tell the difference between 8 PCI-E and 16-PCI-E lanes on current gfx cards.
... is ATI finally coming with decent Linux drivers?
I mean -- my first thought was that this could be in my next system -- but then I remembered that ATI Linux driver support is much behind NVidia. As everybody seems to be buying AMD64 systems to run 64-bit Linux, there is hope that this might change?
Btw, the article seems to be 100% about windows software. Does anyone have any Linux experience with this chipset/system?
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Is there going to be awesome Linux support for this, too..? {cough}where the frig are my 64 bit ATI drivers {cough}
A separate high-end graphics card offloads far more of the graphics drawing functions for very complex 3-D graphics in both OpenGL and DirectX operations than onboard graphics, which means less CPU cycles needed for complex graphics operations.
Even ATI's new chipset for the Athlon64 CPU won't process graphics as fast as ATI's higher-end graphics cards, that's to be sure.
If there happens to be an rpm for the linux distribution (as in my case with SuSE 9.1), it's pretty straight-forward ane asy. Simply install the rpm, reboot, run the fglrxconfig, answer a few questions, and place the newly created XF86Config-4 in /etc/X11. rcxdm restart and voila.
from the article, 4 SATA ports sharing 2 lanes to the northbridge with Everything else in the system except video.
Let's see usb is slow, audio cpu utilisation is high, good thing it's got a good CPU to keep it running.
This machine is going to be fantastic for the rest of the family if it's going to be the special of the week for it's entire existance but I would never touch this.
The 915 and 925X Express ushered in a new era for personal computer hardware and left Intel's chipset competitors choking in the dust.
I love my computer too, but isn't this a little much? At least you can't accuse them of being biased towards one vendor, though.
The best thing that AMD can have happen for them on the corporate front would be to get major vendors like Dell, HP, and IBM to offer their chips in their products.
IBM and Sun are already offering AMD based workstations, in addition to HP blades and supercomputers. At least at the workstation and server level, it seems as if the major vendors are already offering them.
and how well?
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
They don't steal the CPU's cycles like you think. The GPU of the Nforce motherboards is integerated into the northbridge. It doesn't tie up the CPU any more that a gforce 2 does, Except that it doesn't have its own memory. Thats the killer. It has to share memory with the main system. That might also steal some cpu cycles, but my point is that the cpu isn't doing the graphics work.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
They have intel chipsets because people who do it for a living, and not so much for fun, don't want to fuck around with via.
What's the matter with everybody nowadays? The Radeon xPress launch is just a regular product launch, not a friggin "missing link". Pray explain which "paradigm" has "shifted" or which gestalt has been redefined. I can look the other way when marketing suits come up with this kind of hyperbolic garbage, but /.? No way, man.
I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
"It looks like the [noun] could be the missing link that helps [organization] crack [other organization]'s dominance of the consumer and corporate desktop market(s)."
I'm ripping my hair out and wishing it was nvidia because of ATI's atrocious lack of linux support.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
No problem - hope I saved you some grief.
And of course, if you are running a 64 bit system you are equally out of luck.
www.eFax.com are spammers
This is *not* ATI's first attempt at an AMD chipset. Their first attempt was quite a while ago, the Radeon IGP 320 and 320M (similar Intel version was the 340). IIRC, the 320 was targeted at desktops, but never really ever took off. The 320M/340M, however, did reasonably well I think. At least I saw it appear in quite a few Hpaq laptops, and considering that those gave you similar performance to a Radeon 7000 it was great relative to other integrated graphics at the time (which isn't saying much, but if you're buying a budget system it's worth it). However, those early chipsets weren't incredibly good at being chipsets; they were merely passable.
The great thing about these chipsets are that they deliver adequate true DX9-performance (nforce2 IGPs were basically GF2MXs, or DX7 grade) whilst being really good chipsets at the same time. I expect the selling point of these will be to OEMs for systems without graphics cards to cut on costs, but still deliver enough performance to play the Sims and the occasional FPS at low settings.
Having a better product from an architectural standpoint doesn't mean much if you can't mass-produce it. With their new plants they're doing better, but the memory of their past failures is still fresh.
The Raven
Great graphics is just not a variable that most businesses take into consideration when choosing hardware. Today, almost any graphics card will do for most business apps
AMD has the superior product in the Athlon 64
Indeed, and that's why I agree with you about ATI not really helping AMD at all, but for a different reason to yourself.
ATI's effect on others is a curious mixture of help and hindrance because of its wierd market positioning, and the last thing that AMD needs is "help" that raises issues for a section of its customers.
ATI's problem is that it sees itself as betting on rival alternatives instead of (like Intel and nVidia) a backer of anything that moves. We see this with its marginal and quite unhelpful support for Linux, and it's just the same with OpenGL. In both cases, it does the absolute minimimum that it can to be able to claim that it provides "support". Trying to get any real movement from them is like trying to get blood out of a stone, even when they're supplied full details of major showstoppers by highly renowned game developers.
The state of its OpenGL support is particularly bad, and causes havoc in advanced games that go beyond the basics that ATI has bothered to hone. The fanboys will of course say that ATI is catering for the gaming DirectX majority, but that is precisely the point --- it is not "bothering" to provide full and effective support for "minorities" like Linux and OpenGL, and when you happen to be a member of that minority, it matters.
An AMD box crashing when it runs an advanced OpenGL game (there are several I can think of) is no help to AMD's fortunes at all. And that's the issue with ATI.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
nForce4 chipsets for the Athlon 64's do NOT have integrated graphics, not yet at least. I don't think any of the other chipset mfg's do either. On board video is different on the AMD K8's than other processors, the onchip memory controller is great for the CPU, but it makes shared memory slower for the integrated graphics (ATI has a dedicated frame buffer in this new chipset to more than offset this problem).
So, yes, this ATI chipset could be just the ticket for getting Athlon64's into OEM models - you know, the mass market jobs that corp's tend to buy. Decent video for office apps and good prices, when compared to a system with a separate graphics card.
What the heck are "DirectX 9-class graphics"??
DirectX is an API. Supporting that API on your graphics says nothing about your performance level. I could write a driver to support the full DirectX API on a VGA; hopefully that's not the performance level of this new chipset.
And hopefully the chip doesn't directly support DirectX on chip... since DirectX (a) will be obsolete by the time the chip gets to market, and (b) is vastly inferior to OpenGL anyhow....
Gotta love "DX9-class". It's missing the vertex shaders, kids. This isn't a DX9 GPU.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Huh? AMD was shipping over half the new desktop CPUs last I checked (wasn't this a /. story a few weeks ago?)...this isn't like saying "...help Linux crack Microsoft's dominance..." or something like that.
AMD may be an underdog, but they're competing quite well, and may still be shipping over half the new desktops.
it sounds odd to me that something with PCI in it's name is faster than agp.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
While it may outperform Intel's integrated graphics solution, it is outperformed by even the cheapest discreet cards. Anandtech's review shows it outperformed by ATI's own x300 SE, which is the cheapest pci-express card out there.However, going this route probably will be quite a bit cheaper. The x300 SE is selling for $66 on newegg, while mobos with integrated graphics don't seem to sell for too much of a premium over those without, so this could be good for buisness buyers who use apps that mildly push graphics chips. However, this is not news for gamers, as many games will be unplayable on the integrated graphics, with low framerates and poor rendering quality compared to what most gamers are used to.
Is that akin to OpenGL 1.3 or 2.0 class?
Many of these chips will never see a byte of DirectX (presumably Direct3D) code.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
and they were slow and didn't sell, except in the MP configs, where they were the only option
see: Irongate
ATI doesn't pay much attention to the minority. They made promisses of future improvements in the dev of the drivers but it will take a while.
As for their 200 xpress chipset, I'l wait to see a few more reviews (not Toms Gayware) to be sure this chipset is what these benchmarks show.
The opteron is getting a good bit of coverage and I can see the advantages of the dual-core flavor and for 4x and 8x systems.
I'm looking for a dual processor 64 bit box and can't see much advantage of opteron over A64 in this setup. Please tell me if I'm missing something?
TNX
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
I'd say that the on-board video has replaced the add-on card for most users, especially corporate. The price savings are great. I'm also starting to see more small-factor PC's.
If you accept that:
A: You're not going to do any significant upgrades
B: The computer will be replaced within 3-5 years
C: Computers that break will be either covered by a warrenty or replaced.
A small factor PC makes alot of sense. If you don't need any(or only 1) slots - that removes the need for quite a bit of motherboard real estate. You can use the saved space for the Hard drive and CD/DVD.
I don't read AC A human right
I had to do it now. The PCIe wasn't that important to me and support of the current hardware is only now getting halfway decent. I figured I couldn't wait for the new hardware to become mature (no rev 1 for me, thanks!) and for the Linux support.
It took a long time to research the system due to lack of Linux compatibility info. I discovered a lot of info on how well the Athlon 64 CPU overclocks. I mean Really overclocks. There is way more info about OC'ing these chips than running them under Linux.
I haven't overclocked since cranking my Celeron 300 to 366 Mhz in 1999. But I had to give this a shot.. I am typing this from my 1800 Mhz Athlon 3000 90nm cranked to 2430 Mhz with some fast ram. I had it up to 2700 in testing. It screams on Gentoo. I also broke down and splurged on an absurd graphics card, a BFG GeForce 6800 GT. The CPU idles at 36C and the system seems to run much cooler than my nforce2/XP2200. The socket 939 systems feature a dual channel memory controller and the very likely ability to run dual-core CPUs in about a year.
I ended up going with the nforce3 based MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum and an XP-90 cooler. Finding good Linux compatibility info was tough. As for issues, things are pretty good right now. No major gotchas. I would buy that MB again.
My main outstanding issue at the moment is an issue with time ("many lost ticks") and an inability to set the hwclock from Linux. Still need to track that one down.
Obligatory performance numbers.. This system replaced that old Celeron 366. It ran 425 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS while the new system does 4914.
Stream performance is quite insane:
Function Rate (MB/s)
Copy: 4213.8589
Scale: 4148.7969
Add: 4570.0995
Triad: 4564.9183
I mean after AMD uses this "new" uber tech from ATI to over throw Intel's corporate dominance and becomes the worlds largest producer of CPU's do we start rooting for Intel to break the strangle hold AMD has on the corporate market? Or do we continue to cheer AMD?
Am I the only one that thinks that ATI has made some weird decissions for this chipset? First of all, no ethernet? Everybody needs ethernet nowadays. Rather 2 than 1.
Then it is aimed at a high end processor with chipset features that cannot compete with any high end motherboard. 2 channel sound, and you can't get graphic performance unless you buy additional memory. No native command queing either (I've never actually seen anyone USE 4 drive 0+1 raid, so they're excused for that).
Ok, the PCI express is nice to have, but are companies that need a cheap PC going to line up to buy PCI express add on cards? Neh. So who exactly is this chipset aimed at? Since I haven't got a clue.
I've had the 9800 since May 2003, and my Powercolor Radeon 9800 PRO still runs like a charm and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
:)
It is being coupled with a 2.4ghz 512kb AMD64 CPU (3200 Newcastle; liquid cooling 240x10; 1GB ram, SATA drives). Stability, performance is top notch and I can't see myself buying another video card for at least half a year. I should thus be able to get at least a 2 year service life from the 9800 which is pretty good considering the fact that I'm not into anything sub par.
I got the AMD64 CPU a couple of months ago and it was like adding nitrous to my system; it was previously on a AMD-XP running at 2.2ghz, this is now powering my partner's computer, and my partner's ex computer is now being my Mandrake Linux 10.1 box.
If you stagger your upgrades so that you do GPU and CPU/MB independent of each other you'll tend to get a better overall satisfaction by staying ahead of the curve; let the CPU pull the GPU, then let the GPU pull the CPU.
Mind you this doesn't really work if you buy budget stuff, and you've got to time your purchases to coincide with major new releases. The current crop of high end cards are still not completely slaughtering my 9800 but I expect this to change in about half a year when I'll look at upgrading it next.
So a 6 month life span is a bull statement; I reckon you should be able to get at least 1.5 to 2 years out of quality equipment if timed right, and this includes the ability to run the latest titles.
FWIW: My gaming applications include Richard Burns Rally, Nascar 2003, Doom 3 and Eve-online.
ISO certified == THX certified
What i'm quite surprised about is that nobody has mentioned the XBox in all of this. If rumors hold true, Microsoft intends to ship the XBox Next (err, XBox 2, err XBox: Reloaded, whatever you want to call it) with a PowerPC 970 CPU and a GPU and chipset provided by ATI.
:)
That said, this may be a relatively decent look at what is to come in the form of the next XBox product.
I know that this chipset is for Athlon 64. Don't point that out in a reply. I said "look at what is to come", not, "this is clearly the Xbox 2 chipset".
At any rate, if I -was- the kind of person who bought PC hardware (which I'm not), I'd be likely to check out this ATI offering. The performance will probably be more than acceptable, and I do think it's important to support companies who have their headquarters within eye sight of your office.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Remember the Nforce2 IGPs? They were the best performing integrated graphics solution and an excellent buy for non-gamers. Yet you hardly see any of them selling. I don't understand why, I've built many office PCs at very nice prices thanks to these things. But somehow it didn't seem such a good idea for Nvidia and they gave up IGP for the Nforce3 and Nforce4, as apparently there is not enough demand in the market for it.
Does ATI really expect something different to happen with their IGP solution?
Thanks for putting on the feedbag. Thanks for going all out. Thanks for showing me your Swiss Army knife.
Gee, what if . . .
/. has been very lacking in credibility lately.
'fascinating'
Did someone hack the point rating system?
Do corporate marketeers pay legions of off-shore program to moderate up this tripe?
I'm running X.org under Mandrake 10.1 community with the ATi Radeon driver with little problem.
In two years, this chipset will have long been abandoned by the early adopters. By the time Longhorn comes out, this will be exactly what corporations want -- cheap, integrated graphics that can run the fancy 3d-rendered desktop acceptably (but aren't fast enough for much else), that also work with the Athlon 64.
Sure, it's not low-end Dell fodder right now, but ATi has to plan ahead, you know...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Aren't we forgetting somthing here?
NVidia's nForce chipset came out quite a long time ago and had a very good integrated AGP video card in the northbridge (ie, good enough for high-end gaming).
It didnt sway Intel users to change to AMD in any way.
ATI's new chipset will be no different.
Err, Dell being Intel-only notwithstanding, of course. ; )
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I was refering to the pre Athlon days. AMD chips just didn't measure up to Intel chips. They were the budget, low performing alternative. The view most people had of them was they were a second class maker. Now that changed, performance wise, with the Athlon series. They have been powerful performers ever since. However, as I said, opinions change slowly.
I'm not down on the new AMD line, though I disagree with the move to BS numbers (which Intel is doing too) rather than a real property of the chip. The clock speed is a property of the chip, and useful for comparing chips in one line. I had a P4 1.6ghz, I wanted to get something faster. Well a P4 2.4ghz I knew to be somewhere around 150% of the speed, given the mhz rating.
Either way it doesn't mean they aren't powerful chips today, they just were not always. I know many enthusiast types have memories lasting in weeks, but bussinesses tend to have memories lasting in years. It's not fair, just saying how it works.
because there's always some idiot who wants to spend $300 on a high end card because it'll give them another few FPS in 3DMark2003.
you seem to assume that big corporate IT want the fastest machines: we don't. we want ones that have a low, fixed total cost of ownership and have been tested to death by someone else before we buy them in droves. we want to know that we can continue to buy identical kit for the next 3 years. what we don't care about is whether jonny in accounts wants the latest and greatest processor in his machine...
they'll definitely have onboard sound: it just won't be "soundstorm" because they don't want to pay the licencing fees. i'm sure it'll be more than adequate for pretty much everything, just like the nforce2 realtek and soundstorm models were.
Their Linux drivers suck oh-so-much.
If you use Linux, or even if you think you might want to try Linux out at some point in time, you are a bloody fool if you buy an ATI card.
TheInquirer.net reports that the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 beats Intel's "Pentium 4 challenge" of their i915 "Extreme Graphics 2" product line. Let's cut to the important part: "In Doom 3, ATI scores 13.8 FSP, more than double ntel's 6 FPS, on Far Cry 1.3 training ATI scores 24.6 FPS while Intel scores only 10.8, on Splinter cell ATI scores 36.5 while Intel gets 23.6. In Quake 3 results are tight but ATI still wins 112 to 106.7 FPS."
Then you're not an atheist, but an agnostic.
Hi Elendal,
Seems to be a perfect little server board. If you will be running Windows the serial ATA raid may be an option. Software raid does not work for the system drive afaik. Under linux you are probably better off using software raid. The cheap SATA raid will not have any strong processor in it anyway. Don't go cheap on the raid controller, or do it in software. No point in messing with promise or other crap if you've already got it on-board.
I looked at a review and it said the (only) weak point is the lack of USB-2.0 and firewire. Well, boohoo. A simple USB-2.0 add on card will do the trick for USB-2.0 and a soundblaster audigy will do nicely regarding the missing firewire port (no sound either).
Happy configuring.