Overclocking the AMD Spider

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has released two videos that show an overview of the new AMD Spider platform and how easy it is to overclock it with a single tool. The AMD Spider is based on AMD Phenom processors, the newly released ATI Radeon HD 3800 series discrete graphics and AMD 7-Series chipsets."

Comments

Full Video on Youtube

[florescent_beige]

Here.

Re:Full Video on Youtube

[florescent_beige]

In the demo, the presenter overclocks a Phenom 9500 (2.2 GHz) to 3 GHz.

What's new?

[mollymoo]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but this is noting new at all, is it? I mean, the only "innovation" here is that one company is making the CPU, chipset and graphics card. You know, like Intel have been for years. But AMD make one where the graphics card is targeted at gamers. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

Re:What's new?

[moosesocks]

I mean, the only "innovation" here is that one company is making the CPU, chipset and graphics card. You know, like Intel have been for years. But AMD make one where the graphics card is targeted at gamers. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

Not quite. The role of the GPU is stepping up to be much more important than "just games".

Newer operating systems rely extensively on the GPU to render the desktop, apply various effects to it, etc.... These tasks can be as simple as alpha blending, or as complex as providing a hardware-accelerated version of Photoshop.

It's not quite there yet on Windows (Vista implements it rather poorly), but Linux and OS X have been using OpenGL acceleration on the desktop for quite some time now. In what might be a first for a 'desktop' feature, support for it on Linux is actually quite good, and provides a rather nice UI experience (once you turn all of Compiz's superfluous effects off, that is).

I'm going to jump in here as a part-time Apple fanboy, and also point out that Apple's very heavily pushing its set of accelerated 2D Graphics libraries toward developers to integrate into their applications to provide a more natural and fluid experience. In 10.5, OpenGL rendering is pervasive in almost every part of the user interface. Once you've got that framework in place, it becomes very easy to do all sorts of fun stuff without worrying about bogging down the CPU.

Even fast modern CPUs perform miserably when it comes to graphics operations, as they're not designed to cope with vector and matrix operations. With high-resolution displays becoming prevalent these days, it makes a good deal of sense to offload as much of the processing as possible to the GPU. If you implement this properly in the operating system, it's even transparent to the users AND developers. It's very much a no-brainer.

Many GPUs these days also provide accelerated support for video encoding/decoding, which is also a rather strenuous task for a normal desktop CPU to handle efficiently. Video editing applications can also take advantage by providing realtime previews of HD video rendered with effects applied to it.

Anyone who's done a substantial amount of video editing knows just how welcome this would be. Ironically, it's a shift back to an older paradigm, as the Amiga Video Toasters included an array of specialized graphics hardware to do all of the dirty work, and did it in real-time.

This might also translate into some sort of energy savings, given that modern CPUs consume very little power when idle, although this is pure speculation on my part.

There are all sorts of fun applications for this sort of technology once the frameworks are in place. Read up on Apple's 'Core' set of libraries for a fascinating peek into the future of UI and software design. Pixelmator is one of the first applications to take extensive advantage of these features, and is an absolute joy to work with. Although its featureset isn't as extensive as Photoshop, it's damn impressive for a 1.0 product, and I'd daresay that it's a hell of a lot more useful to mainstream audiences than the GIMP is, and has a sexy UI to boot. Dragging the sliders when tweaking a filter, and watching the ENTIRE image smoothly change as you drag the slider seems like nirvana to photographers and graphic artists (even on somewhat old hardware)

So yes. This is a big deal. Everyday desktop software is transitioning toward relying upon the GPU for basic tasks, and AMD has stepped up to the plate to provide a decent set of entry-level graphics hardware to fill in the gap. Remember the state of video hardware before nVidia came along, and introduced the TNT2 and later the Geforce2-MX? Before them, decent 3d graphics hardware was an extravagant luxury. Afterward, it was easily affordable, and nearly ubiquitous.

I should also point out that Intel's graphics hardware is absolute shit. That comparison's just not fair.

Re:DISCRETE

[Dr. Cody]

(to) dis Crete = to insult a Greek isle

I think this counts as insightful

[Kupfernigk]

In order to get to and from the office in a small European city car, with about the same real world consumption as a Prius, I use enough fuel to produce about 6KWH of electricity, enough to run a 4-GPU 2-screen rig for a morning (including the monitors). That is on the very low side for commutes; the guy who commutes from the next large city in his SUV uses as much fuel in a day as I do in two weeks. If one of the ultimate goals of these systems is virtual working in a photo realistic environment, they could be big enough to need a substantial water cooling system and still reduce global warming.

Re:Just release it already

[Torvaun]

The chip can catch the bugs itself. It is a Spider, after all.