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AMD's Hybrid Graphics Unveiled, Tested
ThinSkin writes "The combination of AMD's ATI graphics division and AMD's CPU division means that AMD often fights a two-front war, directly competing against Intel in the CPU business as well as Nvidia in graphics. AMD's Hybrid Graphics technology allows them to fight against both companies at the same time. Inserting an additional card works the same as CrossFire, which, like Nvidia's SLI, was only capable by having two discrete graphics cards installed on a motherboard. ExtremeTech has put the 780G chipset through a series of gaming and synthetic benchmarks to see just how beneficial this technology is. HotHardware has a similar rundown on the technology. The results indicate that Hybrid Graphics aren't yet ideal for the power-hungry gamer, as driver revisions need to be ironed out at this early stage, but performance looks promising."
They also need to test HyperFlash that is in SB 7xx and how many boards will use the 2 usb 1.1 ports for mouse and key board?
There are some other good looks at RS780 performance:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=527 - looks at Hybrid CrossFire with several games in real world testing as well as GPU overclocking; also features the new AMD X2 4850e processor
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/processors/780g-and-4850e/ - looks at both the chipset and CPU
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261 - good motherboard review
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/03/04/amd_780g_integrated_graphics_chipset/1 - tests HQV and HD audio systems
...but can it run Aero in Vista?
...780G-based platform that idles under 80W and runs under full load at 155W. But then AMD adds an element much less common in the integrated world: great performance, regardless of whether you're executing threaded audio encoding software, the latest gaming titles, or even a simple file compression routine. Inclusion of AMD's full UVD gives the chipset real video decoding chops, too. http://www.hothardware.com/articles/AMD_780G_Chipset_and_Athlon_X2_4850e_Preview_/
And it will suck forevermore. It's integrated graphics, thus it shares RAM with the CPU. Ergo, it will suck forever.
As long as ATI makes real graphics cards, they will be in the competition for perf. As soon as they stop, they're leaving nVidia with the monopoly on real good GPUs.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
If SLI can only do 2 cards, what was that when they did 3-way SLI a couple months ago?
Perhaps this may be AMD/ATI's crack at the science rendering market that nVidia has locked down pretty well. If I remember right AMD/ATI released the specs on some of their cards for this kind of work, maybe developing this is a logical step for them in gaining this part of the market as well as a simple way to diversify their products by, counterintuitivly in a way I suppose, combining two of their markets.
AMD is in competition with Intel
ATI is in commpetition with Nvidia
AMD + ATI is in competition with INTEL
Which video chipset manufacturer has the majority of the market? ATI? Nvidia? Matrox? No, Intel does. In fact Intel has more market share then ATI and Nvidia combined. I highly doubt the gamer market will be very high on the uptake of not being able to upgrade their video card. As such this must be aimed more at the integrated mainboard chipset market where Nvidia isn't even a very big player.
PROTIP: you fail at hacking. and just about everything else.
AMD's processors kick butt, however.
Um, what? AMD's processors are terrible these days. There's a reason they're absolutely bleeding money: they're being killed in all segments of the processor market by Intel.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I thought that hybrid graphics was the cpu and gpu on the same die. Integrated graphics is pretty much the norm, with predictable performance increases each year.
I've really got to stop reading the hardware reviews. I just get all worked up for nothing. I've learned that as long as I stay around $1500 to $2000 worth of computer, I get what I need. I guess I've grown out of needing to spend an extra thousand bucks just to get the system with the fastest processor or hottest benchmarks.
When I look at some of the ads in the freebie PC Gamer magazines that end up on my doorstep despite my never having asked for them, and I see the latest systems touted in terms of being able to become a "Fragging Behemoth" or a "Killing machine so awesome you'll need a license", I get the feeling that the market for the top level of hardware has left me behind. Or maybe it's the other way 'round.
I do like the looks of that Blackbird 2, though. Maybe when I get that free 1200 bucks from my pal George Bush I'll add it to my tax refund and see if I can set one a them up as a DAW (with fragging on the side). The liquid cooling might quiet things down in my project studio.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually, hybrid graphics merely supplement a traditional graphics engine with an electrical counterpart.
Um, what? AMD's processors are terrible these days. There's a reason they're absolutely bleeding money: they're being killed in all segments of the processor market by Intel.
They're not terrible, they're just not quite as good as Intel's at the moment.
Terrible is things like Via processors or Transmeta or the other junk you normally wouldn't even consider.
Wait, I thought it was nVidia that has the weak drivers for graphics cards, not ATI. Or is that just for Linux?
Nvidia's primary advantage is their drivers. They've always been leaps and bounds above ATI's. They go back and forth on who has the better hardware. When ATI has the advantage in raw power, it's often canceled by the lower quality of the drivers.
Nvidia's Linux drivers are generally excellent, usually offering performance similar to the Windows drivers. There's a little variance from model to model and release to release, but its close and the advantage can swing either way. However, there's a very small but rather vocal minority of users that have conflicts between Nvidia's drivers and something else in their system who like to complain a lot about them.
Via isn't terribly; they're just aimed at a different segment. The current C7 chips are more akin to the upcoming Intel Atom chips (and in fact share very similar design characteristics).
I picked up a HTPC with onboard nvidia gfx and while it's great for everything else, it has a hard time with 1080p. I just kind of assumed it'd be able to do fullscreen video at 1920x1080, but it is very choppy. Something to consider when looking for an HTPC. There must be reviews of onboard graphics out there...
Meanwhile in history criteria 1992ish:
Nobody with any kind of experience with computers and mathematics would, in their right mind, even expect any sort of integrated FPU to excel at floating point, so why even mention it? What, because it gives the summary and article an extra bit of filler to make it look longer?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=225061,00.asp
I understand that they are merging to similar things, however this is not necessarily good for them. Sure they have consolidated their products (to some extent), however this only puts a greater managing burden on them selves. Do they err on the side of the processor, or the graphics processor? Which gets more attention and money?
Since they can't drop the original architecture just yet, I see this as now fighting a front on 3 sides.
Someone should smack them with the Wealth Of Nations, we divide labour around because nobody can do everything perfectly!
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Send them an email and ask.
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Um, what? AMD's processors are terrible these days.
Um, no. Last year I got an Athlon X2 4600+ (65 watts max) and it does everything I need, and the stock HSF is almost silent. I seriously doubt an Intel processor could do everything this processor does for me, for the same amount of money. And no, I can't overclock because I can't risk the math errors.
It's silly to compare the processors based on those commonly used benchmarks (Quake? WTF?). Even those artificial benchmarks which purport to demonstrate number crunching speed are not as useful as you might think. I could do just as well with an Intel processor, but it will cost me significantly more money to do so because the Intel motherboards and processors are more expensive. I suppose if I played games I would buy a really fast Intel processor, crank the voltage, run a really loud HSF to keep it cool, and curse AMD for not providing me with this wonderful oppotunity. But alas, I don't.
I've noticed that AMD tends to leapfrog Intel in a really big way every few years, then Intel slowly catches up and maybe passes them for a while with evolutionary changes. Then AMD hits another "breakthrough" that blows Intel totally out of the water again for a couple of years.
AMD tends to be smaller, more agile, but slower at the evolutionary tweaks than Intel. Intel's sheer size gives them an edge on the drudgery of small performance and cost optimizations, but they are so big that the "outside the box" thinking needed to really innovate is lost in committee before AMD releases the product.
Right now, Intel has the upper position. Give it a year or two...
None of that hardware matters if the drivers suck. Please hire some good driver developers.
Terrible? Not at all. AMD is still producing very good processors. They were also first up with proper quad-core chips. There's nothing wrong with AMD chips. They're very good. Likewise in the server market their quad core Opterons are excellent. I'm buying exclusively AMD at the moment.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I was in a rather lengthy conversation last week about the future of gaming on computers. Conclusion is that games are not going to survive long on computers for the primary reason that they are far too costly to support. The natural development is to move into highly specialized hardware and better manage the video requirements.
Here's the core of the problem: The video card becomes the single most expensive piece of hardware in a workstation chassis. Within six months I am buying games that marginally run on the equipment and at the end of the year I'm pretty much out. Even at the time of purchase, some video games won't run on the hardware. And gaming is the only segment of the software industry that is pushing against this hardware limitation. Office products, web browsers, email applications do not require this heavy hardware.
There is an increasing movement from desktop to a more distributed/mobile environment of notebooks and central workstations that act as servers for print, file, proxy applications. Notebooks are not built with 100W video cards. But notebooks are what you get when you go to college.
With the advent of PS3, Xbox360, Wii there are specialized pieces of hardware that are intended for gaming and have fixed hardware capabilities. These are the new gaming environments that people are moving into. The issue now is for them to solve how to do MMORPG and similar game constructs under this hardware platform. But by moving game development into this environment there is zero work they have to do in order to get the hardware compatability solved like they do with computers. It's a fixed environment.
Thanks for the reply. I don't follow that stuff very closely.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I wondered how long it would take them to find a way to truly lock in their products all the way to the graphics card. If this catches on, they finally have. Remember back when you could put any brand of processor in your motherboard? Then they got rid of that. Then they started releasing their own north bridges and spread rumors that if you used their brand of north bridge with their brand of graphics card it could run faster. Then, they tried to go even further and tell everyone that if you used their brand of north bridge, video card, and CPU all together with their "Spider" "platform" that it would have some kind of magical, proprietary speed increase, like you were supposed to be glad that they're taking steps to kill more standards and further control the market.
Sorry AMD, I believe in standards and in competition. Make me a CPU and a video card that can work in any computer so that we can get true benchmark comparisons of your products and have the flexibility to do things like easily put in a replacement if your friend's hardware device X dies suddenly.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
My laptop has an Intel 945 chipset and it runs just fine. My friend has Vista on his and Aero runs no problem (and so it should, Aero is just image compositing, not vertex processing).
I bought my laptop just for compatibility testing (I write 3D graphics software) and the graphics have been very stable and surprisingly fast. Intel drivers have always been good. I'm still not sure there's working drivers for the latest ATI/NVIDIA cards (I've had an unusable ATI 2600 HD sitting on my desk for the last six months because there's no working driver for it, NVIDIA aren't all that much better)
The only problems are lack of 3D antialiasing and the vertex processing is in software, though it isn't anywhere near as slow as I expected after all the trashing they get from script kiddies.
They're no good for gaming, sure... but there's absolutely nothing wrong with them for everybody else.
No sig today...
Ever since the Core processors came on the market, Intel has had power parity or better. Even the fastest Intel E8500 3.16 GHz operates with a TDP of 65 watts, the regular 4600+ has TDP of 89 watts unless you have the EE edition. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation. Note that TDP = Thermal Design Power and doesn't say much about how much it really draws, but in general you can see where it gets bumped up. For example, the E4300 1.80 GHz has the same TDP as the previously mentioned E8500 3.16 GHz, but you can be sure it draws a lot less than that while the E8500 is probably quite close.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> there's a very small but rather vocal minority of users that have conflicts between Nvidia's drivers and something else in their system who like to complain a lot about them.
The sort that don't like having their machine rooted by their binary blob video driver
or maybe the sort that don't run Linux
There was once a time when people complained about lack of hardware documentation, please don't lose sight of Freedom Zero.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The sort that don't like having their machine rooted by their binary blob video driver
Is that supposed to mean its ok if your machine get rooted due to an open source video driver?
or maybe the sort that don't run Linux
If they're complaining about Nvidia's Linux drivers not working on their system, then they're rather stupid, don't you think?
There was once a time when people complained about lack of hardware documentation, please don't lose sight of Freedom Zero.
Publicly available hardware documentation is a good thing to have, however, it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the drivers provided by Nvidia.
Not really that terrible now.
They were terrible just before Intel launched the Core2Duo: They only cared about the most profitable segments, being too expensive in the high end, and that happened just because limited production capacity, so they could not provide the market with a whole array of products from low end to ultra high end.
AMD was much better several years ago, with much more bang for the buck than Intel in the segments I usually buy, not the highest end, but still providing competitive value for the price.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Terrible? Not at all. AMD is still producing very good processors. They were also first up with proper quad-core chips. There's nothing wrong with AMD chips. They're very good. Likewise in the server market their quad core Opterons are excellent. I'm buying exclusively AMD at the moment.
"Proper" quad-core chips? What kind of performance gains are those getting you over a C2Q? (The answer is "just about none.")
Opterons are the only place in the market where AMD is competitive. There is literally no reason to buy AMD for anything else at the moment.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
AMD was much better several years ago, with much more bang for the buck than Intel in the segments I usually buy, not the highest end, but still providing competitive value for the price.
So basically where the Core 2 Duos are kicking ass and taking names? Come on, I understand the fanboy attitude but there's nothing to recommend AMD at present outside of the server market. Intel's equal-or-better in power consumption and better in performance. They're not competitive for the price by any stretch.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
> Is that supposed to mean its ok if your machine get rooted due to an open source video driver?
It's is the preferred option over binary blob, yes
New blobs take considerably longer than source code mods
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I said: "Not really that terrible now". Their prices are far less inflated than in 2005-2006. Fact.
I also said they were much better several years ago. And several means like 1999. So there's another fact.
Intel is better now, they are better since mid 2006, BUT I DIDN'T SAID IT. Is that such a huge problem?
I doesn't mean that I don't know about it, just that this was an AMD discussion so I though it was not relevant to the point (That AMD lost their soul by getting too greedy in 2005, and never recovered it). I also don't believe that AMD will leapfrog Intel in the next 3 or 4 years. I can't predict the future, but the trend seems to be that they will lag in production capacity even more. In fact in my post I was trying to explain AMD part in its own fall.
Now please stop calling me fanboy unless you can prove it, with something like an argument, and also please stop being a Intel fanboy yourself.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.