Quad-core Phenom chips arrive

Database News - Wednesday December 12, 2007

MICROPROCESSORS / AMD DEBUTS SPIDER PLATFORM

Quad-core Phenom chips arrive

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

AMD has announced it latest generation platform code-named Spider, which stars the new quad-core Phenom processor, the 700 AMD-series chipset with HyperTransport 3 and PCI Gen 2 and the Ati 3000 series graphics cards with direct X 10.1 support and 4-way crossfire. The first batch of Phenoms reached Thailand in the first week of December, although in limited quantities.

Speaking at the launch of Spider, AMD Thailand country manager Chukkrit Watcharasaksilp said that 2007 had been a good year with over 800 dealers in place, AMD's share of HP, Dell and Acer PCs growing each quarter and a strong presence in the HP, Acer, Dell and Lenovo notebooks. In 2008, Toshiba will join the AMD family and offer Turion-based notebooks.

Major AMD contract wins in 2007 include Thai Airways, Bank Thai and Huachiew University.

Overall, AMD claim a 25 percent market share this year and has targetted 30 percent for 2008.

AMD Far East technology manager Tan See Ghee said the AMD Spider platform would meet the needs of the high-definition video enthusiast market and gaming enthusiasts while featuring unparalleled scalability and energy efficiency on the desktop.

CPU

The Phenom is claimed as the industry's first native quad-core processor rather than a package of two dual-core CPUs side-by-side. It features AMD's latest open-standard Hyper Transport 3.0 bus which supports 1066 MHz DDR2 memory. Hypertransport 3 provides 20.8 Gbps of bandwidth, up from HT 2.0's 8 Gbps and the original HT's 6.4 Gbps.

The new chips feature 48-bit memory addressing, paving the way for up to 256TB of memory addressability.

Tan also confirmed that all the new AM2+ processors and CPUs will be forward and backward compatible with existing AM2 motherboards (save for the lower i/o bandwidth and split power plane) and the same will be true of the AM3 platform to be introduced in 2009.

Another architectural improvement is AMD Coolcore, which turns off parts of the CPUs when not used to reduce power and heat. The major difference from other solutions is that this is purely hardware based and does not require any software drivers.

Chipset

Three 700-series chipsets are being launched initially as part of the Spider platform: the top of the line 790FX, which allows up to 4 graphics cards on a single motherboard; the gamer and HD oriented 790x; and the mainstream 770, which brings entry-level HyperTransport 3 and PCI Gen2 support to the masses.

The 790FX chipset allows up to four graphics cards to be connected. This can be used to drive eight different monitors for virtual reality or realistic flight simulation, or all the graphics cards can be configured for Crossfire X and drive one single monitor to provide enhanced realism at high resolution and frame rates.

All the 700-series chipsets feature automatic overclocking and has full support for high-performance memory, which can add up to 10 percent performance.

The chipsets are all based on a 65 nanometre process and consume only 10 watts of power. Pricing ranges from US$70 for an entry level board to $250 for the ultimate 790FX.

Graphics

ATI's new Radeon 3800 series all feature Gen2 PCI Express and UVD features for high-definition video decoding with very low CPU loads and DirectX 1.01, which will be supported by Vista SP1 next year. The 55 nanometre process means the cards are highly power efficient, consuming only 4 watts at idle and 51 watts during light gaming. The old card would take up to 200 watts.

In Q1 2008, a Radeon 3870x2 card will be released that features two GPUs on the same board.

Asked about availability, Chukkrit said that Gigabyte was already selling ATI 700-series motherboards in the local market and that the first batch of Phenoms would be arriving in Thailand in the first week of December.

However, he said that the region was only allocated "over a thousand" chips for 2008 and that when it came down to the country level, Thailand would have a limited allocation from this first batch.

Bangkok Post