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."

Comments

PC Perspective has also done an article on it.

[pacmanfan]

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=88&type=exper t

Nvidia's support for SATA is better

[3770]

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.

other reviews...

[demonbug]

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.

Re:Step in the right direction

[Lumpy]

are you nuts??

of all the machines I have here the INTEL motherboards are the ones that are the most unstable.

I have 2 highend workstation motherboards that REQUIRE all usb devices to be removed before reboot or the motherboard will hand during post. Yes, this is a real motherboard/bios issue that intel knows about and who's answer is "wait for the next bios release." which means, for us to sod off.

Intel motherboards in my experience are the most likely to have problems.

onboards have seperate GPU's

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Re:onboards have seperate GPU's

[mczak]

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.

That's true for the nforce2. Note though that any other integrated graphic chip up to now does NOT have T&L (or the "modern version" of it, vertex shaders). That's true for intel's graphic core, Via (unichrome), it's true for ATI's old igp320,340, their newer igp9100, and also this one, the rs480 (some reviews think it has hw vertex shaders, others do not. Based on the vertex-heavy benchmarks I've seen I'd say it has no hardware vertex shaders).
So it will use more cpu power. Not that it really matters, since the cpus which are typically used together with integrated graphics are far more powerful comparatively than those used with a high-end graphic card (since integrated graphic chips are about 10 times slower than high-end graphic cards, but you have trouble finding cpus which are more than 40% slower than the fastest available...)

Re:onboards have seperate GPU's

[Bloater]

There is a lot of "extra" work done on a high end GPU that is not put on a northbridge with integrated graphics. The article even states that ATI did some trial and error to work out how much they could get on the northbridge before it became impractical (look at the size of that heatsink).

By putting a framebuffer on the mainboard, they've even reduced the hit due to shared main memory to almost nothing, but some operations normally done on a high end GPU *are* done on the general purpose CPU.

Re:Not really...

[ottffssent]

That hasn't worked in the past. AMD's design talent is better spent on CPUs, and the only reason they used to design chipsets was because nobody else would. Back when AMD was making pin-compatible chips, they didn't need chipsets since they used whatever Intel was making. Then along came the Athlon, and AMD needed a chipset. So they made one, and then stopped as soon as Via and SiS started making their (better; cheaper) own. Then came the Athlon MP, and AMD again released chipsets, first the 760MP and then the 760MPX. Both fairly low-performance, low-feature chipsets designed to get some market adoption and convince the real chipset designers it was worth their time.

These days, everybody knows that 1) Athlons rock, and 2) they'll sell. If AMD now produces their own chipsets, they're just competing with their current chipset partners, and diverting talent from CPU design (and flash, and the other things AMD does). Between ATi, NV, SiS, and Via, there's plenty of competition for the Athlon segment and with Intel's recent return to high-quality chipset manufacture, there's competition to produce the best platform. AMD's held up their end of the bargain, and shortly the chipset makers will catch up to Intel as well.

It'd be great if Dell started selling AMD kit. However, that's not going to happen any time soon. Firstly, Dell's getting huge discounts on CPUs and chipsets from Intel. Secondly, even if AMD were to match Intel on price, AMD doesn't have the fab space to keep up. Fab 30 is going all-out, and AMD's in the process of building another one; also working closely with IBM, etc. in an effort to increase that capacity as cheaply and quickly as they can to capitalize on their superior product. AMD's mid-30% market share corresponds to their maximum output. Dell might be able to bump that up to 50%+, but only if AMD brings another fab online. However, AMD has to be careful about investing too heavily in fab capacity they can't use, so they'll only bring online capacity to handle Dell signing on, if Dell agrees to it beforehand which Dell probably won't do, not knowing if AMD really can live up to their end of the bargain later. Kind of a catch-22, but AMD's doing pretty well these days anyway, and the consumer can't really complain either, so it's all OK.

Haha

[Erwos]

Gotta love "DX9-class". It's missing the vertex shaders, kids. This isn't a DX9 GPU.

-Erwos

Re:Good to see some competition

[Phantom69]

It's called Surroundview and ATi have been supporting it since their integrated Radeon 9100IGP northbridge. It allows the onboard graphics to work with a plug-in AGP card to provide up to three separate VGA/DVI outputs. Press Release: http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2003/4661.htm l

AMD crack Intel's dominance?

[rpdillon]

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.

Just built an Athlon 64 Linux box

[freelunch]

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