ATI and Nvidia came up with a new way to improve graphics performance on the low-end platforms and it's called Hybrid Crossfire and SLI. It will probably end up being called something else, but let's call it that for now.
So, this is important because you can pair up a discrete, albeit slow, graphics card with an RS780 motherboard and make both, together, not so slow anymore. Benchmarks of Hybrid Crossfire showed that pairing an HD3450 with the RS780 IGP improved the performance of the discrete card by 60% in 3D Mark 2006 and 30% in Unreal Tournament 2003. In scores, 3DMark 2006 went from 1600 to 2600 points and UT3 from 33.7 FPS to 43.7 FPS. Not bad for a "free" performance improvement over the HD3450 base score. These scores where in a motherboard using SidePort, which is a memory chip put next to the chipset to help enhance performance, though it is optional. You can see it in the picture below, next to the chipset and below the CPU's heatsink.
Hybrid SLI scores are yet unknown, but they should show up soon.
There are only plans for it to work with low-end cards, namely the HD3450 and 3470, which are reworked HD2400s that support PCIe 2.0, DX10.1 and some will come with DisplayPort. Prices should be $49 and $59, respectively.
This makes sense, since the speed improvement that Hybrid Crossfire brings with higher performance cards would be insignificant. That and they wouldn't know how to make it work, in the same way that you can't use different cards in SLI or Crossfire. Well, you can, but the faster card runs at the speed of the slowest, which is pointless.
What I would like to see is the two graphics cores talking to each other to share shader work, since now even the RS780 IGP supports unified shaders. That way there wouldn't be any more problems with the disparity of power between the IGP and the discrete card, we would just have the IGP there to help when needed.
Not considering just the extra performance, these types of solutions are very important for laptops where they can turn off discrete graphics modules if 3D is not being used. This is where Hybrid SLI and Crossfire are very important because they stop the non-sense of having to use a switch to toggle between discrete and integrated graphics to save energy. The chipset itself will consume a maximum of 20W but comes full of power saving techniques that allow it to drop to around 2W when there isn't any 3D graphics workload. And this, trust me, is what you want your very powerful graphics card to consume when you're browsing web pages or checking your e-mail.
The extra performance, while no so important, is also of note as it provides higher performance at a lower thermal envelope.
If Nvidia is also able to deliver this kind of performance and features with it's chipset, it has something Intel can't offer anytime soon and will probably make many manufacturers ditch the Centrino branding to be able to provide higher performance and features that are available with hybrid multi-GPU solutions.
I would like to remark that, even without the use of a discrete graphics card, the IGP inside the RS780 is a very fast one, that trounces all the competition has to offer, mainly Intel. If AMD can keep increasing the performance of the IGPs in the next few years we could have viable gaming with integrated graphics cards again - something that for long was nothing more than a dream, such was the lack of features and performance of integrated graphics. Eventually that's where Fusion will come in.
Keywords: AMD 780G, AMD RS780, ATI RS780, Hybrid SLI, Hybrid Crossfire, HD3450, HD 3450, HD3470, HD 3470
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