Last week, the AMD 890GX was officially released, marking the debut of the first chipset featuring SATA 6Gbps support. What else is new? Compared to the AMD 785G, not much, especially regarding integrated graphics performance.
The first bad news comes for overclockers, which now have to buy select motherboards to enjoy core unlocking features, whereas with the old SB750 and SB710 most manufacturers had at least one model that allowed core unlocking on CPUs like the Phenom II X2 550 - AMD's SB850 doesn't officially support ACC.
Those however, are other news not very relevant for the main point of this post: integrated graphics performance.
As can be seen in this graphic taken from AnandTech's review, AMD has been loosing ground to Intel in a way that some people would've thought impossible not so long ago. This trend is not likely to continue, at least while Intel is unable to mature the Larrabee architecture.
AMD has been loosing ground mainly due to two factors: engineering efforts aimed at AMD's "Fusion" CPU codenamed "Llano", and the lack of interconnect bandwidth in the current generation CPUs. There is simply no way that the 8GB/s that the current HyperTransport links provide can supply enough bandwidth for "high-performance" integraged GPU, SATA 6Gb/s ports and PCIe links for things like add on cards an USB 3.0 controllers.
"Llano" is aiming to more than set the record straight, it will be a very high-performance integrated GPU compared to contemporary solutions. AMD will provide DirectX 11 compatibility, at least, and rumors point to a 480 shader device, putting it right into the performance of the Radeon HD 5600 series, although at that shader count it will be bandwidth starved.
1 comment:
ACC was bad marketing in first place beside overclocking. Its good thing they going to drop support for core and L3 unlocking feature.
IGP is for office pc only. SB850 looks good. Lets we see how to perform in real life.
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