The new 16-core processors from AMD are targeting enterprise servers for better performance with great power efficiency. AMD Opteron 6200 family of processors code-named Interlagos give enterprises as much as 84 percent better performance, 73 percent better memory bandwidth, and better power efficiency with half the power per core. They save about two-thirds on floor space and two-thirds on platform costs.

The five 6200 chips — 6262 HE, 6272, 6274, 6276 and 6282 SE — run at clock speeds between 1.6GHz and 2.6GHz, and are priced between US$523 and $1,019. The chips draw between 85 watts and 140 watts of power and will plug into existing server sockets to replace older 12-core chips.

This is a great deal for SMB companies that are getting their businesses into cloud computing with more agility and efficiency. The new Opteron chips use AMD’s Bulldozer computing cores.

The Bulldozer architecture mixes the CPU with integer units and a shared floating point unit so more operations can be executed per clock cycle while drawing lower power. Other chip improvements include Turbo Core technology, which can increase clock speed by up to 500MHz across all cores and up to 1GHz on some cores depending on the performance required.

AMD is also introducing the AMD Opteron 4200 series, formerly code-named Valencia, which will come with between six and eight cores. The chips operate at clock speeds between 1.6GHz and 3.0GHz, and are priced between $125 and $377. The 4200 processors are for dense server environments with low-power consumption. The chips draw between 35 watts and 95 watts of power, and as low as 4.3 watts per core

AMD is already workign the server OEMs like HP, Acer, dell to get these new 16-core chips to market, as early as possible.

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The AMD HD 6980 is the world’s fastest dual-chip graphics card for screaming-fast gamer PCs, which can be added to a computer and power as many as five displays at full resolution.

AMD had recently launched few new APU (application processor unit) which is a FUSION of CPU & GPU on a single chip.

AMD claims that the new dual-card graphics card can run 1.4 to 1.8 times faster than a card with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics chip. AMD claims you can achieve resolution upto 7680×1600 and still get outstanding speeds. And if you want more, put two of these graphics card ( equals four chips) you can double the performance.

There is a difference in strategy among the two companies: Nvidia typically has the fastest desktop graphics chip, while AMD can take the crown for the fastest graphics card with two chips in it. Its hard to say which one is a better strategy but gamers do get a choice.

AMD HD6990 graphics card, code-name Antilles, has two settings to make overclocking a child’s play. The card drains 450 watts of power, which is substantial but as far as the heat generation is concerned, the design enables each chip to dissipate the same amount of heat.

The total performance of HD 6990  exceeds 5.4 teraflops with each graphics chip having 2.64 billion transistors. It has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and runs at 830 Mhz (overclockable to 880 megahertz). It has 3,072 stream processors.

AMD is also offering updates to its Gaming Evolved program, which supports open standards for gaming technologies, out of which main one is “Open Stereo 3D“,

AMD has now shipped more than 35 million graphics cards that are compatible with Microsoft’s DX11 graphics standard.

Dirt 2, a DX11 Game:

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Today AMD announced speed bumps to nearly every processor in its desktop lineup. Everything from the dual-core Athlon II to the six-core Phenom II gets a new family member today. And they’re all very attractively priced.

Most of these new Phenom II  (6 core, quad core) and Athlon II don’t come with any major changes and hence we can expect the same performance from them, if not more.

New AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (6 cores) is clocked at 3.2GHz with 9MB of cache and can be boosted with TurboCore to 3.7GHz. This chip will have thermal design power rating of 125W and would be available at for $245.

Quad-core Phenom II lineup gets new 970 Black Edition processor that is clocked at 3.5GHz and is priced for $185 . While the dual-core Phenom II X2 560 clocked at 3.30GHz with 7MB cache is price at $105.

On the other hand, Athlon II family of chips gets quad-core Athlon II X4 645 clocked 3.1GHz with 2MB cache and 95W TDP rating. This Athlon II family quad-core chip will cost $122 which is actually bit higher than the Phenom II X2 560 CPU clocked at 3.3GHz. See, this is where AMD tricks you to choose between pricing and performance.

Llano is slated for release near the end of Q2 next year. While it won’t be a big step forward in CPU performance, we should see a huge increase in integrated graphics performance.

AMD Phenom II, Athlon II New Price List

A Third Phenom II X6

The 1075T 3.0 Ghz, priced at $245, can turbo up to 3.5GHz if three or fewer cores are in use. You get a 6MB L3 and a 3MB L2 (512KB per core).

The Phenom II X6 1075T has no competitively priced answer from Intel. The Core i7 860 is priced at $284, while the Core i5 760 will set you back $205. The default clock speed of the 1075T should bring it close to the Core i5 760 in many tasks, while anything threaded will for sure favor the 1075T.

Intel’s cores get better performance per clock, but not that much better. Single threaded performance and power consumption are both better with the Core i5, but the rest all falls in AMD’s favor.

A 3.5GHz Quad-Core

The new Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition pushes quad-core clock speed to 3.5GHz. The 970 ships with all cache enabled, so that’s 6MB L3 and 2MB total L2.

At $185 the Phenom II X4 970 only has to compete with the Core i5 750 or a bunch of dual-core Clarkdale CPUs. Without Hyper Threading, the matchup can be close.

Single threaded performance is close as AMD has a huge clock speed advantage. AMD gets attractive for slightly lower price and better upgrade path as you’ll can stick a Phenom II X6 in the same Socket-AM3 motherboard.

There’s almost a solution for every budget, and its affordable. Will Intel now slash down prices to give AMD some competition?

Related: AMD unveils CPU GPU Fusion [Llano]

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AMD Fusion was planned for 2011, but as per today’s announcement, they seem pretty confident that they would be able to deliver Fusion products to system builders within this year. No doubt, AMD has been talking about Fusion for years, and Intel has already taken the lead (only in time) to AMD by launching its Clarkdale Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs with integrated graphics, even though these use separate CPU and GPU dies combined in a single CPU package.

Related: Indepth Tech analysis of AMD’s CPU+GPU Fusion: Llano

AMD however, is determined to combine everything into one piece of silicon that does both General purpose CPU and Graphics. On being asked, How well is this going to be, AMD’s representative Bob Grim replies:

“I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that, if you look at the history of AMD, when we came out with dual-core processors, we built a true dual-core processor. When we came out with quad-cores, we built a true quad-core processor. What our competitors did was an MCM solution – taking two chips and gluing them together.

There was a fair bit of engineering work involved too, but we just have a tradition of building a piece of silicon from the ground up, in fact the only MCM (Multi-Chip Module) solution I’m aware of that we’ve ever done is on the server side with our 12-core product (the Opteron 6174). [Regardless], what we’ll be launching with Fusion is definitely all on one die.”

AMD believes (and which is logically true) that building a CPU/GPU hybrid chip on a single piece of silicon would yield significant speed advantages if not Tremendous. Apart from that, it should have power and performance advantages because it is done with latest 32nm manufacturing process. The Future is Fusion.

Read more about AMD Fusion

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The new 12-core Opteron is code-named “Magny-Cours” would fall under AMD Opteron 6100 Series.

The multi-socket processor features a dual-die each featuring 6 cores with total of 12 MB L3 cache, built using 45 nm fabrication technologies.

The Technology

AMD has pumped up a lot of new features including 4 memory channels, HyperTransport technology 3.0, a fourth HyperTransport technology link (for better processor-to-processor communication in 4P servers), and new power management features that enables AMD to double the cores, and achieve up to double the performance, without having to double the power or the cost.

Also, AMD claims that along with the increase of chip count, they have upgraded their direct connect architecture to improve CPU-to-CPU chip communication speeds by 33%.

Performance Benchmark

Instead of using another tool, AMD used the same tool as Intel for benchmarking their Processors– SPECint_rate2006 — for showcasing performance improvements.

Integer Performance: AMD Opteron Model 6174 processor vs. 2P Xeon X5680

Floating Point performance: AMD Opteron Model 6174 processor vs. 2P Xeon X5680

The new Opteron is 21% faster than Intel’s.

And these tests were not with “Highest Performing” AMD Opteron chips, but rather cost-effective ones.

Power consumption

AMD has done some magic around power efficiency. They have doubled cores and stayed in the same power/thermal range compared to previous generations, and therefore they beat Intel’s 130watt  by 80W ACP part

Pricing

AMD’s medium-high notch (read cost-effective) processor (which performs way better than Intel) is 42% cheaper than Intel’s. ($1663 vs. $1165)

[via AMD blog]

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Before we Begin
You would need a Running Leopard to prepare a restore Disk. It can be any 10.5.x Osx86 distro (Google for iAtkos or any other that you prefer) or you can even get it done from someone’s Mac/PC which has any version of Mac OS X running.

In case you don’t have it, You can follow our Older guide to install Mac OS X Leopard on PC, just choose a OSx86 distro that works on AMD.

Pre-Requisites:
- A Retail DVD/Image of Snow Leopard 10A432.
- An empty partition or drive with at least 10GB free space.
- Download This ZIP (Hardknox) The files used from this archive are highlighted in Red over the tutorial.

Note: There’s a tutorial which is 90% similar to this one and published in Videos. You might want to check it in case you find it hard to follow the instructions below.

Installing Snow Leopard on AMD Turion/Phenom II Hackintosh

Step 1. Mount the Snow Leopard .DMG file, then use Disk Utility and save a writeable .DMG file to your desktop. Un-Mount the Read-Only .DMG and Mount the newly created writeable .DMG.

Step 2. Open the image, click Go In the Top Menu Bar and select “Go To Folder” then type “/Volumes/<Mounted Snow Leopard Install Disk>/System/Installation/Packages.

Step 3. Copy the OSInstall.mpkg to replace the one in the path we navigated to in Step 2.

Step 4. Using Disk Utility, create a new partition, let’s call it “Snowfx”, with “Mac os x Journaled” option. When done, make sure the permissions of the partition/drive are correct by running the following commands in the terminal:
>sudo -s
>chown 0:0 /Volumes/Snowfx

Step 5. Run the “OSInstall.mpkg” file you replaced earlier in the Packages folder. While installing, select the new Partition  and customize the install by removing all the unnecessary stuff like languages, Printers.
This installation would take anywhere between 10-25 minutes. chill out in the meantime.
Congrats, you are half way there. Bear it a bit longer.

Step 6. Run Chameleon RC2 and select the new drive When that completes go into the Chameleon RC3 Folder then into the i386 folder and copy the BOOT file.

Step 7. Run ShowAllFiles and select “Show”. Now you need to replace the boot file in the root directory of the new partition (Snowfx) with the BOOT file from the i386 folder.

Step 8. Next we do some Kext (driver) alterations in order to make it compatible with AMD.

• In “Snowfx” navigate to  /Extra/Extensions directory and delete “Disabler.kext”.  Next, goto /System/Library/Extensions and  delete “AppleHPET.kext” and “AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext”.
• Alright, 3 are deleted now we copy 7 into current directory (/S/L/E) from  Snow Kexts Folder. These 7 files are:  AppleACPIPS2Nub.kext, fakesmc.kext, NullCPUPowerManagement.kext, OpenHaltRestart.kext, PlatformUUID.kext, VoodooHDA.kext and VoodooPS2Controller.kext

Step 9. Copy the Kext Utility to your current desktop, then copy the /Extra/Extensions folder from “Snowfx” to your current desktop. Now drag this Extensions folder to Kext Utility app (the one on desktop) to open and repair the permissions of that /Extensions Folder. When done, it creates a new “Extensions.mkext “on your desktop. Navigate to the “/Extra” on “Snowfx” and delete the old “Extensions” directory and “Extensions.mkext”. Then copy the new “/Extensions” Folder and “Extensions.mkext” from your desktop to “/Snowfx/Extra”.

Step 10. Run DSDT Patcher from the DSDT folder. In the patcher for OS options select Darwin/Mac OS X and for patcher options select Apply DSDT to “Snowfx”

Step 11. Copy smbios.plist to /Snowfx/Extra and copy “com.apple.boot.plist” file to your current desktop, open it and look for “mach_kernel”. Add “.test7″ to the end of it as show below:
“<string>mach_kernel.test7</string>”
and save it. then drag drop it back to /Extra folder.
Once you are done that, copy **mach_kernel.test7** and place it in your SNOW partition/drive root directory.

Step 12. Hold your breath, this is the final step Lets run one simple command to repair permissions and we are all done. Open terminal and execute:
>sudo -s
>cd /Volumes/Snowfx/System/Library/Extensions
>chown -R root:wheel *
>chmod -R 755 *

Alrighty! you’re done.

Post Installation Fixes:

When you boot into your OS, you should probably repair permissions through Disk Utility. (If for some reason the OS says you don’t have the package installed for Repairing your permissions Navigate back to the Packages folder in the SNOW.DMG you installed from and install the BSD package).
There are high chances that your sound, ehternet, dont work out of the box thats coz snow leoaprd is made for Mac and not your PC. You will have to look around web or perhaps ask @taranfx for proper kexts.
If for some reasons you are not able to boot into Snow Leopard, try booting with “-v” and sendout the error message to me on @taranfx on twitter.

Goood Luck! Tip: In case you need quick assistance, contact me on Twitter: @taranfx

AMD has announced a new chip is called the “Llano” processor which is not just a  CPU or GPU, instead, it’s a hybrid design that the chip company calls as an “Application Processor Unit,” or APU.

Intel’s current offering for the laptops is pretty limited in power they offer for graphics. They offer very-basic level of HD video playback, with DirectX 9 graphics to notebooks. AMD’s Llano will be combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four CPU cores on a single 32nm processor die. This can literally swipe away all the Intel Laptop market.

At this time not much is known about the GPU, what we know is that the GPU offered by this APU combo is highly parallel vector. For the CPU, AMD has taken the “STARS” core that’s used in their current 45nm processor, shrunk them into a new 32nm SOI high-K process. AMD further added new power gating and dynamic power optimization capabilities to it. The result: 4Cores, each core has approx. 35 million transistors, and a 1MB L2 cache. It is planned to be clocked under 3Ghz and the power consumption would range between 2.5 to 25 watts(peek).

AMD will introduce another offering for the mobile called “Bobcat” which is more portable across a range of processes and configurations, and features less custom work that in Llano.

Llano will see some appearances in the later half of this year, and OEMs will be shipped around early 2011.

Power optimization
The most amazing part of this chip is it’s unique approach to dynamic power optimization. It is a step ahead from the traditional analog power management, towards digital, which makes it more accurate, efficient.

How Power optimization worked in current-gen. Processors: Normally, Power module takes analog input from a set of diodes placed throughout the die which act as thermal sensors, informing the module when the die heats up in an area due to increased compute activity.Temperature is the means for calculating power consumption.

Now, there is a problem with this approach: Ambient (surrounding) temperature changes (even minor ones) can change the values, make unwise decisions in setting the right clock speed and hence inefficient use of energy. And if the temperature changes are huge, like moving a laptop from A/C cabin to outdoors, the calculations go upto 40% incorrect.

However, Llano does it smartly. It uses a set of 95 bits of signals from different parts of the chip (pre-identified) are monitored, which have strong correlation to power consumption. This includes monitoring  integer traffic, cache misses, or branch mis-predicts via low-frequency sampling, which yields a very-high accuracy in determining the power usage.

AMD Fusion and future:

Clearly, AMD + ATI Fusion is now the way to go on notebooks. The combo/Fusion will reduce the Bus latency between CPU-GPU as they are now on the same Chip, making graphics faster and GPGPU apps more powerful.

Intel barely has any integrated GPU for 2011. Unless Intel buys NVIDIA, I don’t see them leading this segment.
On the other side,  NVIDIA’s upcoming x86 CPU + GPU combination would be interesting but we’ve to see how they perform in the CPU segment and not to forget they have some pending DMI licensing disputes.

Altogether, 2011 is going to be interesting for the notebook segment and It would make alot more sense even for general purpose apps to run on GPU with DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration API) on Windows, VAAPI on Linux.

[via Inquirer]

We write Latest in Hardware: Intel, AMD, Research,Gadgets: Android, iPhone, Apple, Google and Tech Guides, Tech News @taranfx on Twitter and:

Sure, it was a great innovation but several years later was copied and re-branded as Hyper Threading (HT) by Intel #mce_temp_url#in it’s x86 processors. Intel claims it to produce two parallel threads without loss in performance. Well, it’s not true.

AMD has recently talked about why it doesn’t opt for Hyper threading, rather lays multicores as it’s core business strategy.

To understand this, lets go back to basics.

Threads vs. Cores

Cores are physical hardware blocks in the processor that can run applications serially. Threads, on the other hand, aren’t physical –  they are software-generated tasks that can execute
independently. A well threaded program will run itself across multiple cores.

As Intel quotes it:

HT adds circuitry and functionality into a traditional processor to enable one physical processor to appear as two separate logical processors. The added circuitry enables the processor to maintain two separate architectural states and separate APIC which provides multi-processor interrupt management and incorporates both static and dynamic symmetric interrupt distribution across all processors. The shared resources include items such as cache, registers, and execution units to execute two separate programs or two threads simultaneously.

As AMD quotes it:

So – cores are like bikes, threads are the riders. Running more threads increases throughput for applications as long as you have available cores. If you have threads waiting to be scheduled and no available cores – you have a bottleneck.

Think of SMT and HT as a tandem bike.  Yes it can move two riders, but not as quickly or efficiently as two separate bikes.

The hard thing for SMT & HT is that, it forces two threads to share a single  physical core.  When one thread pauses or stops due to a wait, then the second thread can jump in and take over.  But, the second thread needs to unload the cache, load its data, then, when finished, reload the original data for the first thread – this is what bring a big overhead.  This  helped with processors that had long pipelines of request.  Todays’ generation and next gen CPU have shorter pipelines make this type of effort  less important.

To be precise, HT is nothing more than a layer of abstraction added to the “processor->kernel” interaction that lets CPU decide how to handle multitasking rather than letting Operating system doing that.

All in all, HT can give applications as much as an extra 10-25% increase in performance by making better use of CPU, which is like a poor option over adding a new core.

Hyper Threading in the Real world

These, limitations were just theoretical. Practically, it’s even worse. Leaving desktop applications aside, it almost fails everywhere. In the production environments I’ve seen HT causing serious performance degrades and often admins just have to switch it off.

Hyper-Threading will increase the latency of individual requests and trade that for increased throughput; any individual request takes longer to complete, but more requests can be completed in a given time period. Going from uni-processor to multi-processor also adds cache contention and the increased locking complexity also slows things down; so performance will vary depending on what you are doing.

Larger multi-processor/Hyper-Threading systems with more than one physical processor tend to do better because their Hyper-Threading companion processors are more likely to be idle and halted. But as the load increases, those processors wake up and the overall latency in the system increases.

• When your bottleneck is device I/O, whether LAN or Disk, Hyper-Threading does not increase performance.
• When you have a single operation/thread generating high CPU utilization, Hyper-Threading does not increase performance.

I remember the time when we deployed my company’s Supplychain J2ee based applications on unix sandboxes, Java performance degrade of  upto 30% was observed. That was the first time I learned the myth about hyper threading.

Today, almost every production environment has mandated to stay away from it. Here are few examples:

• Novell calls Disabling HT a cool solution.
• Cognos, a leading BI software by IBM, recommends  disabling HyperThreading for better performance, stablity.
• Microsoft recommends turning off HyperThreading when running PeopleSoft applications because “our lab testing has shown little or no improvement.”
• A Microsoft TechNet article recommends disabling Hyper-threading for production Exchange servers and “only enabled if absolutely necessary as a temporary measure to increase CPU capacity until additional hardware can be obtained.”
• Advanced Clustering found when running High Performance Linpack (HPL) that “Using HT on the other hand causes a ~10% drop in performance compared to HT not being used.”

Ofcourse HT can provide a cheaper and power efficient solution for desktop by giving 10-20% performance benefit but as desktop apps and Operating Systems are becoming more capable, intelligent, demanding and hence more Multithreaded, HT loses it’s purpose.

We need more cores. Sun SPARC has 8 cores, AMD and Intel too will have them soon. We need to continue this innovation more than looking at the cheaper alternatives that add little value.

We write on Hardware, Open Source, Programming, Tech news, gadgets,  Get them @taranfx on Twitter

AMD is claiming that this graphics card breaks several older records. Besides being the fastest, it’s the one of the first to provide support for Microsoft DirectX 11 and Eyefinity multi-display (that’s three displays at once) at a max resolution of 7680×1600. Talking about the Horsepower, it delivers approximately 5 TeraFLOPS of computer power (and up to 10TeraFlops when combined with ATI CrossFireX).

Inside DirectX 11 – Dx11

The HD 5970, by default, is capable of being Overclocked. And there is no need to worry much about heating, the advance onboard fan does cool the card pretty nicely due to the new vapor chamber technologies and a vented exhaust.

Radeon HD 5970 specifications

GPUs runs at 725MHz, that the graphics card has 3200 stream processors (2×1600) and that it has 2GB GDDR5 memory.
The rest of specification includes 160 texture units, 116 Gtexel/second texture fill rate, compute performance of 4.64 Tflops as well as 64 ROPs. Pixel fillrate is 46.4Gpixels/s, Z / stencil is at 185.6 Gsamples/s and the memory data rate is 4.0 Gbps.

Maximum board power is 294W, while the idle power is 42W. Let’s not forget that the card has two DVI ports and DisplayPort, something that barely anyone needs.

In celebration of their fancy new card and their 40th birthday, AMD is also sponsoring a contest, starting today, where participants could win one of 10 Microsoft Xbox 360s or one of 10 Wiis from Nintendo. You can enter by becoming a fan of AMD on Facebook.

Update: AMD has added a video to demonstrate the power:

The Radeon HD 5970 is now available for sale with a hefty price tag of $599. Gamers, game on.

ATi Radeon HD 5750 5770 brings Gaming on Budget

The moment of joy was expressed by AMD CEO Dirk Meyer. He  said the settlement leads both companies will bring a  “new era”  in the chip industry.

The two companies also sealed a five-year cross license deal and said they would give up any claims of breach from their previous license agreement.

“While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development,” AMD and Intel said in a joint statement.

Under the terms of the settlement, Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion. Also:

• AMD and Intel both get patent rights in a cross-licensing pact;
• Intel will give up any patent claims against AMD;
• Intel will agree to adhere to business practice provisions;
• And AMD drops all pending litigation against Intel.

Today marks the beginning of a new era… one that confirms that the game has changed for AMD. It is an important milestone for us, for our customers, our partners, and most important – for consumers and businesses worldwide. In addition, it represents the culmination many years of litigation and regulatory engagement. And we are optimistic that it will usher a new era for our industry.

We look forward to healthy competition with the mutual respect one would expect between world-class competitors.

It remains to be seen if this settlement marks a new chip era, but the “healthy competition” Meyer refers to will determine AMD’s fate.

Shares of AMD jumped 23 per cent to $6.55 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange this afternoon. Intel shares were halted. Intel now expects spending in the quarter to be $4.2 billion, up from $2.9 billion.

So the “new Era” is about to begin where chip manufacturers respect the competition? What do you think?

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Thanks to ATi, they have this new lineup coming for budget gaming enthusiasts. The latest HD 5750 and HD 5770 offer Direct X 11 graphics under $150.

Launched on October 13th, these graphics cards really mean business, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve rarely seen so many connectivity options (DVI, HDMI, Display Port are, of course, present) in one card and I have to admit that for the first time in some years, NVIDIA seems to really have some competition. The card features 720 stream processors, as well as a core that’s clocked at 700 MHz.

The HD 5770 is powered by the compact 180 mm Juniper die, which means reasonable power consumption as well as an efficient, cool and inexpensive product. The exact specifications are still up in the air. Perhaps today’s benchmarks will give us an idea. According to GPU-Z, the HD 5770 sample tested is running at 850 MHz core, and 1200 MHz fast GDDR5 memory to a 128-bit interface for a memory bandwidth of 77 GB/s.

Overall, looks like the 5770 GPU is on par with the 4870 and the 5750 is just above the Radeon 4850. Very impressive for mid-range cards that also supports Dx11 out of the box.

Tech Specs

• Engine clock speed: 850 MHz (5750), 1200Mhz (5770)
• RAM: 1 GB, GDDR5
• Processing power (single precision): 1.36 TeraFLOPS
• Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 76.8 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 108 Watts
• Idle board power: 18 Watts

Only doubt that I have is DX11 really necessary?

Here is a benchmark from GPUCafe showing FPS for various games 1920×1080. The Result: 5770 is on average 17% faster than the 5750.

Key Features for 5770

• GDDR5 memory interface
• DirectX® 11 support
  • Shader Model 5.0
• OpenGL 3.2 support¹
• ATI Stream acceleration technology
  • OpenCL 1.0 compliant
  • Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology
• ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology
  • Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP
    • Max resolution: 2560×1600
  • Integrated DisplayPort output
  • Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
    • Max resolution: 1920×1200¹²
  • Integrated VGA output
    • Max resolution: 2048×1536
  • 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support
  • Integrated HD audio controller
    • Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
    • Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
• Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP

Well, here is the solution- Get best of both worlds.

Lucid last year promised to develop a chipset that would enable any motherboard to work with any combination of GPUs and still able to get 100 percent of the performance out of both.

It took them more than a year to fight against laws of physics . Now, the company has unveiled its HYDRA 200 Parallel Graphics Chip, a tiny 65nm processor that, when installed on a motherboard or expansion card.

On the motherboard manufacturing and support front, MSI has eagerly showed interest, and they become the first company to sign up.  What’s even more interesting was to see their demonstration Intel P55-based Gaming Motherboard, offering a HYDRA 200 and three PCIe slots for some serious GPU power.

In-house preliminary tests show performance never seen before on MSI Big Bang motherboards running such popular game titles as Crysis, F.E.A.R.2: Project Origin, Left4Dead 2 and Bioshock.

The motherboard will be available in the stores for 2009 holiday season.

Here is the basics of How it works:

This device is capable of intercepting DirectX or OpenGL command stream before it hits the GPU, analyzing the data, and dividing up scene at an object level. Rather than rendering alternating frames, or screens split on the horizontal, this part is capable of load balancing things like groups of triangles that are associated with a single group of textures and sending these tasks to whatever GPU it makes the most sense to render on. The scene is composited after all GPUs finish rendering their parts and send the data back to the Lucid chip. Utterly amazing, no less than rocket science.

via [Anandtech]

At this year’s CES, AMD demoed something new that shows how their platform technology can enable fully interactive cloud gaming. Sounds cool but what exactly is that? Cloud computing allows fully interactive game play from virtually any type of client over the Internet because the heavy lifting is being done “server side” in the cloud.

The user logs on, clicks open a browser and then starts blasting away. No hours of game installation, no exotic authorization dances, just instant gratification That is the main story of cloud computing. Enough preaching but I had to let that fly because it’s a powerful look at a better future for gaming.
The CES demo consisted of an AMD Fusion Render Nod that hosted an off-the-shelf version of EA’s amazing “Mercenaries II” served up via the Internet. The laptop powered  by AMD technology was given a URL to click and Mercenararies-II fired up.  Playback was full screen at 60 frames/sec.

Is it a Video trick?

Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY, is the Guru of GPGPU. The software that made this work is from his company.  He is to the GPU what Robert Rodriguez (another artist who employs AMD technology) is to digital moviemaking.

Jules is a true innovator and someone who chose AMD because we have all the pieces to make this work. We are the only one-stop-shopping platform solution for cloud computing hardware. The OTOY software harnesses the full power of the AMD platform including CPU, GPU and our Direct Connect high bandwidth interconnect.
In short, the game source code unaltered is hosted on the AMD Fusion Render Cloud hardware and served up on the web via breathtaking OTOY compression technology made possible by the AMD combined platform power. The OTOY software allows multiple instances of a game to be hosted on the AMD Fusion Render node so the solution scales for all the right economic reasons such as energy efficiency, space,  quiet operation, etc.

In a nutshell, OTOY claims to be able to deliver 3D games in real-time over the Internet, so that you can play, say, Crysis by using a remote render farm as a kind of terminal server that pushes out frames to a thin client that just does display and user input.

How is this accomplished?

It’s pretty interesting. First, the Game is rendered like normal on the server machine, where frames from it are grabbed by the OTOY server-side software. Next, these frames are compressed and sent out over the network to the client, which decompresses them using a very small chunk of code.

In fact, it can be surprisingly small. e.g.  780KB on the iPhone. It then displays them in a window. User input is sent back to the server over UDP because it’s tolerant of packet loss, so you don’t add to latency by resending dropped packets.

The demos of Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft were surprisingly responsive, despite the fact that the games were being served up by machines in a different state.

As expected, there was some discernible lag, but not much worse than what it was in Quake deathmatch days. The main problem with these demos was that one can easily see a ton of compression artifacts on the large monitors that AMD used.

Smaller monitors and fewer demo stations (for more bandwidth per station) would’ve put OTOY in a better light, but unless the visual experience was very significantly improved One couldn’t see immediately see many PC or console gamers settling for this in its present state.

But for casual/handheld gaming, this tech has immediate potential, as Crysis running the iPhone demonstrated. The iPhone’s screen was small enough and the gameplay was smooth and responsive.

As for OTOY’s prospects for eventually reaching the hardcore, my chat with their engineer proved instructive.

Will this Cloud Gaming Prevail ?

There’s a network bandwidth threshold beyond which OTOY’s technology is “good enough” to compete with a locally run game, and that this threshold is at the 20Mbit mark, which is the point that OTOY can push 1080p frames across the network. As long as latency is under control, if you’re playing at full 1080p then you’ll be just as happy gaming remotely via, say, a set-top box, as you are playing locally on very expensive hardware.

If you can game on way more parallel computing power at 1080p over the network than you could ever afford to buy locally, then even a hardcore gamer may be willing to tolerate a little latency and loss of sharpness, at least for certain types of games.

I can see where game developers love this idea, because it solves their piracy problem in one shot, eliminates support costs, and gives them a recurring revenue stream via subscriptions. I’m still having a bit of trouble getting my head around why AMD/ATI thinks this is a good long-term idea, though, because it seems like it could sell a lot more silicon to gamers than it could to render farms. It’s probably the case that AMD is happy to sell GPUs to both clients and servers for a while, especially if it opens up a new market like iPhone gaming to high-end GPUs.

AMD has introduced a 40W six-core Opteron processor. The overhauled chip offers 31 percent higher performance-per-watt over a standard quad-core Opteron.

What’s New ?

• It’s Greener – The 40-watt 6-core Opteron delivers the same processing capacity with about 30% less power consumption.

• Leaner – Takes less Space – Implementing 6-core CPU’s allows businesses to get the same server capacity with one-sixth of the physical servers.
• Cheaper -

“This six-core Opteron – which operates on a 40 watt power band – is specifically tailored to ensure strong performance while helping to reduce power consumption,” Kerby told TG Daily. He added, “And unlike other chips manufactured by the competition [Intel Xeon], our six-core EE Opteron retains certain, much-loved features that are consistent with AMD’s HE iteration. For example, we have not reduced the memory speed, bus support, hyperthreading or cache size. As such, deployment of the 40W Opteron will undoubtedly extend well beyond Cloud 2.0 and social media environments.”

Jeff Jenkins of AMD expressed similar sentiments.

“The advent of cloud computing and social media networks have brought new datacenter requirements to the forefront,” explained Jenkins. “A number of companies have expressed interest in low-power solutions that don’t compromise virtualization capabilities or performance features. That is why we designed our six-core Opteron EE processor. It does more with less and helps address the very relevant challenge of maintaining dense data centers.”

“We’re still able to achieve up to 30% higher performance, as well as just above 30% higher performance-per-watt in that particular processor,” stated AMD Senior Product Manager Brent Kirby in an interview with Betanews. Another formula that works to AMD’s advantage in this demonstration: A rack with 24 servers, all using AMD’s current line of six-core Opteron SEs at the 75W power range, could be traded for a rack of 42 servers using new six-core Opteron EEs at 40W, and stay within the same power envelope.

But what is the performance trade-off, if any? Or to put it more bluntly, will those 42 EE servers perform any better, or even worse, than those 24 SE servers? We asked this question a number of different ways, and the answers we got harked back to a now-familiar AMD theme: For the customers who would consider buying EE in the first place, raw performance isn’t a real factor.

“For a lot of the cloud [server] guys, honestly, they realize that their computational utilization is not as high. It’s more about I/O and memory bandwidth, and getting them more memory,” responded Kirby. Of course, they’re trying to get the right balance of cores, but they’re also wanting to make sure they get enough memory capability, as well as I/O capability, within these servers. It becomes a more important criteria than just raw compute power.”

The importance seems a bit clearer when you consider AMD’s assertion that the power savings per server rack could come up to $50,000, or could surpass $1 million per year for a data center with 25 racks. But that assumes workloads stay the same, and a more accurate assessment of actual power savings when two racks so configured are given similar workloads, has yet to be conducted. Suffice it to say that the EE’s SPEC scores are indeed impressive: A two-way server running a pair of Opteron 2419 EE six-core processors scored a 1,614 on the SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark test, compared to the same brand of server (ZT Systems 1224Ra) running a pair of quad-core Opteron 2384s, which scored a 1,166 on the same test. That’s to say, the 2419 delivered better efficiency for the performance it did deliver.

The EE rollout isn’t the only news from AMD this morning: Senior Product Manager Bart Arnold confirmed to Betanews that throughout the first half of next year, the company will bring back its 4000 and 6000 product line designations, to accompany the 2000 and 8000 series it’s been running with this year. This according to a plan first put forth last April.

“The 6000 series will be aimed at the performance market; that’s our ‘Magny-Cours’ product. It’s going to have two variations: one 12-core and one 8-core,” stated Arnold. “Then in the second quarter, we’re going to be releasing our C32 ‘Lisbon’ platform, the 4000 series. That is going to be aimed at the market that is very concerned with power efficiency as well as cost-efficiency; the people who are looking to get a little more bang for their buck. It’s not going to be quite as robust, it’s not going to support as much memory, but…when we release the EE version of that platform, it’s going to be really eye-popping low. I can’t really tell you at this point exactly how low yet, because we haven’t been able to test it, but we are planning on setting the power efficiency market on-end with that particular product.”

But once again, the questions will probably include, how much or how little of a performance tradeoff will there be, for those investing in the 4000 series; and what gains will data centers experience by going all the way with a 12-core setup?

“I think the answer to that is found in consolidation,” Arnold responded. “I think that the number of cores that the product is going to have, along with the memory scale with its four memory channels, will allow them to run, in the case of virtualization, a whole lot of virtual machines to consolidate their data center further.”

So it would appear that AMD’s typical value proposition, including with its latest EE announced today — just drop it in place of your old Opteron — has a limited shelf life to it. Once the 8-core and 12-core era is upon us by Q2 2010, the argument will change to one that emphasizes the benefits of moving from a two-way to a one-way server. Just after that time also, AMD’s Brent Kirby confirmed to Betanews, the company will begin making its argument in favor of shifting from DDR2 to DDR3 memory, once costs are no longer a prohibitive factor .

Intel and AMD will continue to leapfrog each other and move the processing bar. Behind the headlines about advances in 6-core CPU’s, the two processor titans continue research and development of 8, 12, and even 16-core processors. The more processing capacity that can be squeezed into a single physical server, especially combined with lower power-consumption, the more companies can achieve with less space, less money, and a smaller carbon footprint.

via – Betanews, TGDaily

AMD has twisted the concept,  that takes the GPGPU idea and flips it on its head. AMD has announced the industry’s first OpenCL SDK for x86 processors. Coders can now write to the graphics API and run the resulting code on an AMD or Intel processor.

AMD has announced the release of the first OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs, and it will enable developers to target x86 processors with the kind of OpenCL code that’s normally written for GPUs. In a way, this is a reverse of the normal “GPGPU” trend, in which programs that run on a CPU are modified to run in whole or in part on a GPU.

But why would some one want the reverse i.e. execute GPU instructions with x86 CPU?

One most evident reason that I see is Debugging – if you don’t have access to an OpenCL-compliant GPU. And for now, that’s essentially what it will be doing. Going further, developers will be able to write in OpenCL and target multicore x86 CPUs alongside GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. Of course, when you can write once and target a variety of parallel hardware types, the fact that Larrabee runs x86 will be irrelevant; so Intel had better be able to scale up Larrabee’s performance, because its x86 support will not be a selling point.

More at Arstechnica

CPU has gone multicore, still we need GPU powered applications for all types of complex graphics.

May it be Windows Aero interface or Your photo/video editing/re-sampling application, it now needs and is able to Utilize your GPU (provided you have supported one).

Accelerated Graphics, totally absent from Web world, are now opening up for direct GPU access offloading CPU further. A new venture that includes  Mozilla, Google, and Opera Software — along with graphics processor leaders AMD (ATI) and Nvidia, announced this morning their intention to produce a royalty-free mechanism for producing hardware-assisted 3D graphics using JavaScript-enabled Web pages, for initial distribution during the first half of next year.

The Internet Graphics are planned to be based on OpenGL ES. The new Web-OpenGL or WebGL language could potentially open up the field of Web applications to classes of software traditionally reserved for local, on-system installation, including computer-aided design and engineering, rich visualization, and of course, gaming. While the <CANVAS> element in HTML 5 is already supports 3D geometry, what WebGL would enable is the ability for JavaScript developers to utilize the GPU to produce fast, fluid, rendered scenes, effectively extending the already proven OpenGL ES system used by Sony’s PlayStation 3, to the realm of Web apps.

WebGL is intended on Hardware accelerated complex 2D, 3D Rendering of pixels, which is much faster as compared to Software rendering.

It’s evident that the WebGL would be integrated into browsers, not attached as add-ons. In many senses, WebGL already is integrated, through browsers such as the latest Firefox 3.5 that already support HTML 5. What work remains includes the production of a final, formal specification for WebGL.

Motivating the new WebGL standard, Mozilla standards evangelist said,

“The Web has already seen the wide proliferation of compelling 2D graphical applications, and we think 3D is the next step for Firefox. We look forward to a new class of 3D-enriched Web applications within Canvas, and for creative synergy between OpenGL developers and Web developers.”

At this time, there is no good code to demonstrate power of WebGL.

One of them appeared in December 2005 project SourceForge site, in a file named sample.html. And it’s not that impressive: a live rendering of three sides of a randomly rotating cube. The source code for this little project, shown here, reveals that familiar OpenGL functions that define viewports, object identities, and that scale and rotate an object within a viewport, show up quite clearly as JavaScript functions.

For more than 3 years, the rotating cube corner has pretty much been the Benchmark / “test pattern” for WebGL. But today’s endorsement by the Khronos Group, responsible for OpenGL and OpenGL ES, could catapult this project from virtual stagnation into overdrive.

For AMD, the early launch of Istanbul is a positive development in its battle with Intel. AMD, however, is months behind Intel’s Dunnington chip, a six-core server processor that launched in September.
Leslie Sobon, vice president of product marketing at AMD, gave her pitch in a Webcast. Her message: Istanbul is an easier upgrade since its based on a common platform with previous generations with more performance per watt. Sobon noted that AMD’s latest Opteron is available today. The AMD strategy revolves around value in a down economy.

AMD’s strategy is to talk about virtualization and power efficiency and offering those features across all of its processors. AMD called out Intel for rejiggering features based on the chip.

Here’s AMD’s money chart:

AMD also talked up performance per watt and additional savings since Istanbul operates on the same platform as its predecessor, Shanghai. The argument: AMD’s six-core Opteron uses the same chassis, hard disk, power supply and number of DIMMs. That adds up to save money.

Systems based on Istanbul will be available in June from the likes of Cray, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems. HE, SE and EE versions of the six-Core AMD Opteron are planned for the second half of 2009.

And a few additional charts:

From now users with a lust for raw horsepower can sink their teeth into a factory overclocked, ultra air-cooled HD 4890 that hits the magical 1GHz barrier. There’s been no formal announcement made about what partners will be selling the 1GHz variant, but AMD does note that Asus, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, Gigabyte, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), ITC, Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology and XFX are all estatic about the news. That bleeding edge sure kills, doesn’t it?

Here goes the actual Official Announcement:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — May 13, 2009 –Building on the success of the recently launched ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 graphics card — driven by the world’s most powerful graphics processor1 — AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced availability of a factory overclocked graphics processor that is the first to break the 1 Gigahertz (GHz) barrier using standard air-cooling solutions.

• With this product, AMD achieves a notable engineering milestone as the first graphics company to break the 1 GHz barrier.
• The new ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 utilizes advanced GDDR5 memory and a 1 GHz clock speed to deliver 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power, 50 percent more than that of the competition’s best single-GPU solution². With this level of raw compute power, the1 GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 is set to deliver new levels of general purpose GPU-accelerated performance in ATI Stream applications such as video transcoding and post processing.
• This new version of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 marks the latest addition to the award-winning ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series delivered by AMD technology partners Sapphire, XFX, Asus and TUL.
• The advanced design of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers an amazing gaming experience in the latest games, including ground-breaking DirectX® 10.1 titles such as Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.™, Electronic Art’s BattleForge™ and SEGA’s Stormrise™ released last month, as well as GSC Gameworld’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky. When compared to DirectX 10 game play, DirectX 10.1 games have proven to deliver higher game performance and an improved visual experience. In addition, these cards feature support for open standards like OpenGL3 with DirectX® 10-like hardware extensions, and the recently ratified OpenCL specification.
• The ATI Radeon HD 4890 supports advanced game physics. At the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Havok and AMD demonstrated the first implementation of OpenCL running on AMD graphics processors. In the demonstration, Havok’s physics technology delivered complex and realistic simulations of real-world materials like cloth, demonstrating the potential for increased realism in forthcoming games.
• To date, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 card has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Editor’s Choice Gold Award from HardOCP, the HotHardware Recommended Award and the Editor’s Choice Award from Tweaktown, among others. The accolades speak to the excitement around the product and to the continued strength of the discrete graphics market overall, something analyst Dr. Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research predicts will continue to play a strong role in the computing industry.
• As a result of the worldwide accolades from media, developers, enthusiasts and fans, AMD released an “inside look” at how the card was made and what it means for gamers. The card marks a new aspect to the AMD “Dragon” desktop platform technology, providing an even more powerful single GPU desktop graphics option to OEMs, channel partners, and do-it-yourself (DIY) consumers

“Throughout the 40-year history of AMD, we have continually focused on technology firsts that deliver superior value to the customer,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president, Products Group, AMD. “The 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship single-GPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerated applications built with OpenCL.”

Ecosystem support
The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card is supported by a dozen add-in-board companies offering a variety of custom board and cooling solutions. Technology partners include ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, Gigabyte, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), ITC, Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology and XFX.

Here is what partners are saying about the overclocked edition of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card:

“Achieving air-cooled clock speeds of 1 GHz with our Vapor-X cooler immediately puts the new Sapphire HD 4890 Atomic Edition graphics card in an overclocking class of its own,” said Adrian Thomson, vice president, Marketing, Sapphire. “At 150 MHz above stock speeds, this card will unlock new levels of performance and allow gamers to push the latest DirectX 10.1 titles to new highs in image quality and frame rates.”

“XFX is renowned for its ability to design and deliver high-performance graphics products, expertly overclocked to maximize every aspect of the GPU,” said Eddie Memon, senior vice president, Marketing, XFX. “The XFX team was excited to see just how far we could push the 1 GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890. I know our customers are going to love the performance of XFX’s ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 Black Edition. Hitting 1GHz is an amazing feat, even more so when done in production-level volumes and with overclocking headroom to spare.”

“ASUS has always prided itself on delivering leading technology, and the ASUS EAH4890 Formula Series packs all of the great features and performance gamers crave,” said Kent Chien, associate vice president of graphics and multimedia business, ASUS. “In addition, we are equipping the ASUS EAH4890 Formula Series with Voltage Tweak technology and Super ML Cap, giving gamers the flexibility to boost GPU voltage and achieve as much as an 18 percent performance improvement over factory settings. The ASUS EAH4890 Formula Series and Voltage Tweak is a potent combination.”

“With the PowerColor PCS++ HD4890, we built a truly performant graphics card around the exceptional ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics processor and added our own ZEROtherm cooling system,” said Ted Chen, CEO of TUL Corporation. “The mix of ATI Radeon HD graphics technology and PowerColor design gives our customers enthusiast-level game performance at an affordable price.”

Note: Damage caused by overclocking AMD’s GPUs above factory-set overclocking is not covered by AMD’s product warranty, even when such overclocking is enabled via AMD software.