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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."
If SLI can only do 2 cards, what was that when they did 3-way SLI a couple months ago?
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.
Hell, forget non-gamers... what about mobile users? I've found that many times it's just the graphics chip in my laptops that are too slow. It'd be great to be able to just pop a new chip in there. Most notebooks don't have upgradeable graphics, and when they do, they still suck.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.