Monday, July 24, 2006

More conspiracy... AMD & ATI...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3367&tag=nl.e622

OK... it's getting wacky, folks.  If AMD starts folding in the high-performance ATI GPU chips into either the CPU (interesting...), or into the chipsets (so last century), they could end up spanking Intel's currently integrated graphics solutions... which are marginal at best.  Of course, they'll probably use that nice low-performance shared memory :-(.  2006 is shaping up to be an interesting year on so many levels...

Now.. NVidia fan-boys start slamming ATI, and ATI fan-boys start slamming AMD and/or NVidia...  For me, I marginally prefer ATI over NVidia... however my current laptop (a Dell Inspiron Latitude D820) has an NVidia chipset, but my last few laptops all had ATI (Dell Inspiron D810, IBM Thinkpad A31p).

So does Intel snap-up NVidia as a defensive move or do they beef up the "V//V" (is that veev, or vive?)?  I expect something will happen.

11 comments:

  1. If you are using cHT (coherent HyperTransport) to couple the GPU and CPU and give both local memory (just like 2 opterons each have their own local memory but can access the memory of each other) then a "shared memory" architecture for GPU/CPU is everything but low-performance.

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  2. ATI used to get bad reviews for the "incompleteness" of their drivers, but I have always used ATI video cards (with windows and Linus) without any problems.


    That being said, the computer I am just installing has an ASUS, NVIDIA-based video card, so we'll see how it goes.


    Since AMD uses NVIDIA support chips, it may make for an interesting relationship.

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  3. Thorsten,


    True... only if the MB/Chipset/CPU folks would actually start putting cHT into the mass-market. So far, I've seen very little about cHT. Too new or just too expensive?

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  4. Bill,


    I've always had pretty good luck with ATI drivers, and they always seem to keep improving them. I have an old ATI 7500 All-in-Wonder, and all the latest drivers still work with it. Of course, there may not be too many enhancements that actually work with the 7500 chipset, but if there are any core fixes, I should be able to take advantage of them.


    Likewise, I'm sure that NVidia has it's own brand of quirks and foibles and you can line up just as many folks who say the same things about their driver suppport.

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  5. Allen,


    cHT *IS* what all multi CPU opteron systems use for communication between the CPUs. HT is normally used for communication with the chipset, cHT for communication between CPUs as it allows to keep cache coherency. The main difference between the 1xx, 2xx and 8xx opterons (with all pre-AM2 desktop AMD64 CPUs falling in the same category as the 1xx) is the number of HT ports. 1xx have 1 HT port, non-cHT. 2xx have 3 HT ports, 1 of which is cHT. 8xx have 3 HT ports, all of which are cHT. That's the main reason why you haven't seen anything about cHT on the desktop so far. But the new Socket AM introduces at least the possibility for cHT ports on CPUs for that socket. I don't know if the current AM2 CPUs actually have a cHT port, most likely not, but the possibility is now there.

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  6. Thorsten,


    Ah! OK. I'd been keeping track of HT and had actually missed a lot of the cHT angle. With that, the I *do* like what HT and NUMA tries to accomplish. Add in cHT which increases cache coherency.. I can see that there's certainly some advantage to that architecture over Intel's.

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  7. After:

    -years of buying ATI AiW cards,

    -never being very happy with the software but never hearing about anything better

    -My AiW9800 COMBUSTING in the machine

    -My AiW9800 constantly crashing my machine if I foolishly did something like watch TV...

    -Finally having found the Hauppage 500mce anf GBRTV


    Next time, my video card isn't going to be half the card it could be just because I can watch tv. Next time, I am buying an NVidea based card and getting it all. No more flakey promises more than it delivers ATI cards for me.


    And if AMD wants to saddle itself with all that debt AND cards that run so hot they can actually burn, hey, more power to them (probably on yet another molex connector)


    Frankly, if they wanted to put it onto the CPU, you might want to look into liquid nitrogen cooling...


    Nope, no more ATI for me, I've seen the light.

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  8. No cHT can help to overcome difference in speed/access times between DDR2 memory and memory integrated on graphics cards.

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  9. VI = 6, IV = 4 => VIIV = 64


    AMD processor is no longer hot.


    And ATi 9800 is fault on FastWrite on chipset.


    By the way,

    post recently, lastest Intel processor(not conroe)has many bugs fixed(30 bugs) and remain many bugs. most of bug, cannot fixed by software.


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  10. Not to be fussy here, but as I know the D-series is Latitude, not Inspiron. There is a different naming scheme (if any?) for Inspiron, as all "character"-series Latitudes are - more or less - compatible. And Latitude does make more sense in a business context.

    Knowing all this because just sitting in front of one ;-)

    Best regards.

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  11. Christoph,


    Of course, you're right. I updated the post. I remember that I'd been browsing the Dell site prior to making that post and had 'Inspiron' on the brain. Good catch.

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