AM3 Reference Diagram Disclosed

psyph3r writes "Chilehardware has released what appears to be a confidential image showing the future customer desktop AM3 reference boards for AMD and ATI. Here is an English site talking about this reference design image and the features it enables. 'The biggest improvement for this generation of chipsets is the audio and video capabilities integrated into the motherboard. The new features packed into these chipsets are beginning to look like standalone platforms. The RS780 supports DirectX 10 and has a UVD, which is similar to most High-end cards of today.'"

Comments

In other words, integrated

[Applekid]

Hasn't integrated audio and video been around forever?

Supporting DirectX 10 and all that is great and all, but, how fast will it be? I remember getting an nForce 4 integrated video board for my folks some time ago and it supported the latest DirectX versions and, while it ran all the nVidia eyecandy demos, it sure was slow.

I mean, TFA makes reference to Hypertransport 3.0 and all, but memory bandwidth is only part of pretty pixels.

Re:In other words, integrated

[moderatorrater]

I don't understand the assumption that they can't embed a high-end graphics card in a motherboard I assume that it can be done but it hasn't. The reason I assume it hasn't been done is that the resulting motherboard would then have to go through testing and the video card would have to get integrated. In the meanwhile, the GPU market is moving forward and releasing new cards and marking down existing ones. In addition, the video card industry moves faster than the motherboard industry generally speaking, so while a good motherboard is useful 6 months later at roughly the same cost, a video card isn't. Most motherboard manufacturers would rather let enthusiasts with higher graphics requirements purchase the card separately and embed low-quality GPUs for people who don't need a better one.

What I want from a motherboard...

[unfunk]

* No integrated Audio
* No Integrated Video

Is that really so hard? Integrated video is easy enough to avoid, but you just can't get a motherboard these days that doesn't have onboard audio. I'm sick of having to disable it whenever I get a new board, and the amount of space the jacks take up on the rear panel could be better used for more USB or Firewire ports.
I use an old Soundblaster Audigy for my sound needs, and it does everything I need. In hardware. Every time I buy a new motherboard, I test the onboard audio first, just to see if it's gotten any better than I last tried it.
So far, this card's lasted me four complete system overhauls, and at this rate, will last until a version of Windows comes out that where Creative don't release drivers for it.

Re:What I want from a motherboard...

[TheMeuge]

Agreed ... I still haven't found an onboard adapter better than my Live 5.1.

You mean like every single board that has audio based on the Via chipset that integrates the Envy24HT chip?

Live 5.1 is sonically one of the worst sound cards ever made. My 8-year-old Vortex2 from Aureal, is MUCH better... and the $20 Chaintech AV-710 absolutely blows it away.

Re:What I want from a motherboard...

[Aladrin]

It's simple: Adding onboard audio costs them almost nothing and gains them quite a few sales.

Re:What I want from a motherboard...

[TheGratefulNet]

look around for 'bit perfect' playback. you won't find it for soundblaster style cards. NOTHING from that company is even remotely pro audio quality or even home theater spdif bit-perfect output.

hint: their internal arch. resamples ALL data to 48k. even 48k gets resampled (man!, that's dumb) to 48k. hopes of having literal bit-perfect 44.1 is hopeless with creative brand.

envy24 - full-on pro chipset. I've used that one in my studio for years.

before that was the cmedia 8738 (still a gem if you can find it). also bit-perfect and has some great free drivers (sourceforge) that allow kernel streaming (win-xp) and bit perfect mixer-goof-proof output.

almost all else is drek. ie, junk.

Re:Call me ignorant, but...

[Svartalf]

You're not really that ignorant... :-)

In the case of the discrete cards (PCI-E, AGP...) they have a pool of memory that's accessible via the bus and that's directly accessible by the GPU's own memory bus (That memory size when you see 128, 256, 512Mb, etc.)- which is faster than just about anything out there and has no contention spots for the GPU to have to wait any longer than the access latency to the memory from the second access port. The peak speed of the GPUs when compared to an IGP solution comes from the contention-less, very, very fast access to the card's memory pool so that you don't stall the graphics pipeline. A stall of a microsecond can cost you FPS (Duh...) and larger stalls can drag framerates to the slide show domain- it's part of why the older ATI fglrx drivers were roughly 50% slower under Linux when compared to Windows. They had a stall in there somewhere that was introduced by their way of getting their then Windows-ish codebase to work under Linux.

Now, having said this, Hypertransport's suspiciously close to the same performance level of most of the local GPU buses and you only need to deal with bus contention issues for the only real performance snag. IGPs start making sense at that point for many applications because the memory's now close to the same speed as the add-in card's memory with similar latencies. The only real slowdown would be that you don't have dual pathways now.