ati

Ghosts of projects past haunt Intel graphics chip

Intel's checkered past on some large projects means the chipmaker must prove that Larrabee isn't a development flub that will simply be kept on life support for the next few years.

As reported last week, Intel's Larrabee graphics chip was killed as an initial product offering after protracted delays, demonstrating that as successful as Intel is, it's not immune to major product missteps.

If certain product histories are any indication, the challenge could be daunting. Intel's XScale processor for small devices--which was used in Compaq handhelds back in 2000--was sold off to Marvell in 2006 after an unsuccessful run. And its Itanium processor has been the object of perennial ridicule as a product hanging on for dear life after getting off to a very rocky start back in 1998. Sun Microsystem's former CEO Scott McNealy eventually dubbed the chip the "Itanic" as a play on the word Titanic.

"If you go back in history when they started down the Itanium path in the mid-90s, they said they were going to have a really whiz-bang product, but by the time they finally got it out, it was decidedly ho-hum or even worse," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.

"They've learned that you don't ship a product the first time around so that when it finally does appear people go 'What was all the fuss about?'" he said.

Larrabee, as we know now, was not ready for prime time. "It was for all intents [and] purposes an Intel project--a test bed, some might say a paper tiger," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, writing in a blog.

For better or worse, Intel is expected to forge ahead with Larrabee, with a real product not appearing until… Read more

Intel shifts focus to laptop graphics technology

Intel will focus on next-generation laptop technology that combines graphics functions with the main processor, in the wake of the cancellation of its initial "Larrabee" graphics processor.

Despite the market-rattling news from Intel late on Friday--which pushed rival Nvidia's stock up more than 12 percent on Monday--Intel still remains the leader in the high-volume "integrated" graphics market.

And the world's largest chipmaker is about to up the ante in this market for low-cost graphics technology, which many consumers opt for instead of high-performance chips from Nvidia or Advanced Micro Devices's ATI unit.

Later … Read more

AMD extends 3D card lead with high-end ATI Radeon HD 5970

AMD announced its newest high-end graphics card this morning, the dual-chip ATI Radeon HD 5970. Available today for $599, the new high-end card features two clock speed-reduced Radeon HD 5870 GPUs on a single graphics card.

Based on the Radeon HD 5000-series chip design, the new Radeon HD 5970 card has the same features common to AMD's other new 3D cards, including DirectX 11 support, GPU computing via ATI's Stream technology, as well as support for up to three monitors via a technology AMD calls Eyefinity (the six-monitor card is due out "soon," according to AMD).… Read more

AMD unveils 'world's fastest' graphics card

Advanced Micro Devices is laying claim to the world's fastest graphics card at it continues an assault on Nvidia at the high-end of the graphics chip market.

As teased last week by AMD senior vice president Rick Bergman at a financial analyst meeting, the "Hemlock" graphics card--now officially called the ATI Radeon HD 5970--is AMD's top-of-the-line graphics product.

"It's in production. You'll be able to buy it at e-tailers around the world...Five Teraflops out of this baby," Bergman said last week. A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, … Read more

From its glass house, Nvidia throws stones at AMD over Windows 7 support

Update: AMD sent along a clarification of the various issues Nvidia raised regarding AMD's drivers:

"We actually moved our DirectX 9 hardware to a "legacy driver" status back in March 2009, and we were quite open about this move" [[ed: News to us]]. We've been providing updates to this driver on a quarterly basis - ironic considering the fact that we are offering more frequent updates of our "legacy" driver than some companies do of their "current" drivers. In fact we will be posting a new legacy driver in the next few days.

Also, as you probably well know, WDDM1.1 (Windows Display Driver Model) is the driver architecture required to run Windows 7. To meet Microsoft requirements, GPU's must be DirectX10 and later level hardware. As stated on our website, Windows 7 users with DirectX 9 AMD graphics hardware can use the legacy Windows Vista WDDM 1.0 drivers (as it is not possible for DirectX 9 hardware to support the WDDM 1.1 driver requirements)."

Ever-helpful Nvidia sent us an e-mail this morning with a few updates regarding Windows 7 and AMD's older 3D cards. Some of AMD's old cards are cut-off from official Windows 7 support altogether, and others are missing out on a few of Windows 7's more-advanced features. Before we accuse AMD of abandoning its customer base, we thought we'd try to track down just how many customers will be affected by this news.

The numbers for the Windows 7 cut-off issue are difficult to track down due to the age of the cards involved. As announced in a support update on its Web site, AMD plans to move its pre-DirectX 10 graphics cards to legacy status. That means AMD will no longer update the software drivers for 3D cards from its Radeon HD 1000 series or older. You can try using the most current Vista-compatible driver for those cards in Windows 7, or try to find a user-made driver, but AMD won't be able to provide you with support.… Read more

ATI and Nvidia face off--obliquely

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI division are taking different approaches to graphics processing in the next generations of their products. Both strategies have strengths and weaknesses, and I think it's too soon to pick the eventual winner in this long-running fight.

Before I get into my analysis, I should say that Nvidia paid me to write a white paper on the implications of its new GPU architecture (code-named Fermi) for high-performance computing applications. The white paper was released as part of the Fermi launch event at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference last week.

Nvidia also paid for white papers from two other well-known microprocessor analysts, Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 and my friend and former colleague Tom Halfhill of Microprocessor Report. UC Berkeley professor David Patterson wrote a fourth white paper, and Nvidia wrote one of its own. All of these works take a different approach to the subject; all are worth reading if you need to understand what Fermi is all about.

In short, I think the Fermi architecture has been more thoroughly white-papered than any graphics chip design in history. All five of these documents are available on the Fermi home page on Nvidia's Web site, and just in case that page is moved or changed, you're welcome to take advantage of my own mirror of my white paper.

I've spent much of the last several days reading these documents plus David Kanter's excellent article on Fermi over on his Real World Technologies site. David managed to get some details on Fermi that Nvidia didn't give to the rest of us.

I've also had time to go through the coverage of ATI's recent launch of the RV870, which is what Nvidia's Fermi-based chips will be competing against. The first of Nvidia's chips bears the internal code name of GF100, and it's huge. Here's a life-size photo:… Read more

AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 5800 3D cards first to market with DirectX 11 support

Update: Reviews from Anandtech, HardOCP, HotHardware, MaximumPC, and PC Perspective are all live. Nvidia's dual-chip GeForce GTX 295 card outperforms the Radeon HD 5870 on most tests by a noticeable margin, so AMD can't claim that the Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest single-card solution. The good news is that new Radeon does outperform Nvidia's best single-chip card, the GeForce GTX 285. The dual-chip GTX 295 is also a $499 card with no DirectX 11 support. The Radeon HD 5870 goes for a more reasonable $379.

AMD introduced its ATI Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850 desktop graphics cards Tuesday evening, beating rival Nvidia to the marketplace with the first DirectX 11-capable products. As DirectX 11 is the Windows 7 version of Microsoft's code for linking up hardware with, among other things, 3D game software, winning the race to launch is a significant boon to AMD's efforts to market its new cards. It also ensures that even if few games will actually use DirectX 11 at launch, Microsoft can claim that the graphics hardware is ready to support one of the major new features of its new OS.

Expect a whole family of Radeon HD 5000 series cards to come to market over the next few months, but for now we get two cards, the $399 Radeon HD 5870 and the $250 Radeon HD 5850. AMD says it plans to ship 500,000 chips in the fourth quarter, but it also anticipates high demand will strain retail supplies during the first few weeks after launch. On the system builder side, AMD said that one large OEM has claimed the majority of the first round of Radeon 5800s, so the cards will also be scarce from other system builders, at least early on.

Dropping its chip manufacturing process from 55 nanometers to 40 nanometers in the Radeon HD 5800 series has let AMD ramp up the speeds and feeds of its new chips impressively over those of the Radeon HD 4800 series. The transistor count in particular has jumped from 956 million on the old design to 2.15 billion in the new model. AMD also claims an uptick from 1.2 teraflops of processing power to between 2.09 and 2.72 in the each of the new cards.… Read more

Intel shows off Larrabee graphics chip for first time

SAN FRANCISCO--Heads up, Nvidia. Intel demonstrated its Larrabee graphics chip for the first time Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum.

Larrabee will be Intel's first discrete, or standalone, graphics processor in about 10 years and is expected to compete with graphics chips from Nvidia and AMD's ATI unit. The demo used an early "stepping," or version, of Larrabee, which is expected to come out commercially sometime next year.

Larrabee will be targeted initially at the gaming market. The demonstration was based on the game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from Splash Damage (See video.)

"This is … Read more

Future AMD chip boasts 'human eye' reality

On Thursday, AMD demonstrated graphics chip technology that the company says approaches the arc and clarity seen by the human eye.

Eyefinity is a multi-display technology that will be part of future Radeon graphics chips designed to use up to six connected high-definition displays that can achieve "up to 12 times 1080p high-definition resolution, which approaches eye-definition optical clarity," the company said in a statement.

The goal is to create virtual environments so detailed that they seem optically real to the human eye. In a single PC, this yields a resolution of 268 megapixels, roughly equivalent to the … Read more

Intel, Microsoft event to highlight Windows 7 improvements

Intel and Microsoft will hold an event next week to discuss collaboration on improvements to Windows 7.

The event, on September 1 in San Francisco, will "share how the two companies collaborated on key enhancements during the development of Windows 7," according to Intel. Steve Smith, vice president and director, Intel's Digital Enterprise Group Operations, and Michael Angiulo, general manager of Windows Planning and PC Ecosystem at Microsoft, will talk at the event. Microsoft plans to launch Windows 7 on October 22.

Windows 7 collaboration will be demonstrated by engineers from both companies, according to Intel. Not … Read more