AMD’s Upcoming Graphics Triumphs

Larrabee? We don’t need no stinkin’ Larrabee!

Hopefully that will soon be true. Intel has never been known for great graphics  - does anyone else remember the i740? What a disappointment that was.

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I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about upcoming developments in graphics, some of which have been announced at the Taiwanese computer shows (Computex 2009), others from European or US publications.

The next generation of integrated graphics for AMD mainboards will be known as the 785G chipset, and will bring Radeon 4000 series performance to the party (specifically called HD4200), along with enough bang to do Blu-ray decoding without the help of a dedicated video card. That will be very good news for home theater enthusiasts, making one more open slot to be stuffed with perhaps a tertiary tuner, or maybe a higher performance sound card. Certain versions are reported to have more capabilities, depending on clock speed.

More interesting than that is a chipset being released by AMD that, for now, will not be finding its way into a motherboard northbridge, which is too bad, as it seems to pack a punch like no other,

from Ars Technica

AMD has announced the ATI Radeon E4690, a new GPU for embedded systems which it says will triple the performance of its embedded predecessor, the E2400, and more than double that of the celebrated HD3200 integrated chip. It’s not likely that the E4690 will be integrated into a northbridge from AMD any time soon, if ever, but there are reasons to hope it will happen.
The E4690 isn’t intended for the consumer market; AMD’s PR material mentions arcade systems, digital signage products, and casino games like slot machines and video poker. These applications, AMD hopes, will be compelled enough by a high-performance embedded GPU to use it in their machines. Although AMD-powered one-armed bandits may soon be robbing people all over the country, as a PC-gaming, digital signage-shunning, gambling-is-bad-for-you prude, I am unsatisfied. I want the E4690, or something very similar, in a northbridge.

Here’s why: HTPC. The E4690 scores 2669 in 3DMark 2006, with a TDP of 25W, while the HD3200 GPU in the 780G northbridge scores only 1183 with a TDP of 15W. The 780G, itself the most powerful onboard GPU ever, and in its own class compared with Intel’s offerings, is a lightweight next to this new embedded chip. In fact, the E4690’s score is only 25 percent lower than the HD3850. And still, a lower-clocked E4690 can draw as little as 8W. So, the E4690 can game way better than the 780G or any other onboard GPU.

It can also decode HD video streams, two simultaneous streams of 1080p H.264, in fact, with no intervention by the processor. This means that, for HTPC applications, it won’t really matter what the processor is. Atom or Nano should be enough. And, even for beefier HTPCs, the opportunity to go with an onboard GPU, even a relatively expensive one, would be most welcome.

Something like that indeed! If this kind of power is available with that little dissipation, why wouldn’t AMD release this on a motherboard? I’m hoping that this might actually become the basis for the 880 chipset, which was sidestepped, as the oomph provided by the offered product was not considered worthy of the full series number jump. That is, the 785G mentioned above was to have originally been called the 880G, but AMD decided against that idea.

Maybe the E4690 will become part of the 880G, and soon.

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