2 - AMD
First purely a little "text" coverage as our first stops where two partners we can't show you anything from. AMD and NVIDIA. I'll do it in alphabetical order.
AMD had some good presence on Hall 20 this year, along with the World Cyber Games in that hall. It was so noisy and loud that they moved all appointments to some meeting rooms in another Hall at the last minute. Obviously I do not need to go into detail, but AMD launched their 780G chipset with support for Hybrid CrossFire. Really cool technology to be honest, I'm pretty excited about it as performance and power consumption levels are just really sweet. We'll have loads of photo's on these boards in this pictorial. Last week the first 780G mainboard already arrived in our labs, its still pending our review though. But honestly exciting stuff.
We also had a brief that on AMDs new "Puma" Mobile Platform. Puma is AMDs third-generation mobile platform based on AMDs Griffin processor and RS780M chipset. I'll leave that for what it is though, once launched we'll get into more detail. But The RS780M includes an integrated Direct X 10 graphics controller which AMD says is four to five times faster than Intels X3100 IGP, and brings support for HDMI and HDCP + Audio to Puma via AMDs Universal Video Decoder.
CPUs wise it obviously is no secret that their 45nm processors are on it's way, to be released pretty soon actually. Next to that the new B3 revisions of the Phenom processors will be out soon and it will allow them the much needed clock frequency increase of the Phenom processor which can finally bring them closer to the higher performing Core 2 processors from Intel. Weirdly enough the new triple-core processors, codenamed Toliman, will debut with frequencies as high as 2.3 GHz. They'll have all of the same capabilities of the high-end Agena/Phenom processors with the exception of one disabled processor core. This includes 2MB of shared L3 cache and 512KB per core of unshared L2 cache.
On the graphics front there really wasn't anything superbly new to report. Besides their announcement of CrossfireX support in the latest 8.3 driver, which we briefly tested and where a bit disappointed about.
At the Cyber World Games in hall 20 AMD/ATi had some good presence though, people could chill out and game a little with AMD solutions.
