Workstation and Commercial Client Updates
The FireGL series from ATI used to be the top solution for professional graphics but just as in the desktop world, NVIDIA’s options have made major in-roads. These slides show us the upcoming R600 based FireGL products should be out soon and also show the future of the overall workstation market for Barcelona and beyond. Interestingly AMD doesn’t have their own chipset planned for Barcelona or Budapest workstations but instead will rely on NVIDIA’s nForce professional chipsets. In late 2008 with Shanghai, AMD is planning only “continued collaboration with industry-leading chipset partners.”
Octal-core products are also mentioned here (yes 8 cores!) for workstations and servers. Details include 4 HyperTransport links, DDR3 memory controller, PCI Express 2.0 and Direct Connect 2 technology. The time line at the top points to a mid- to late 2009 release.
AMD was promoting their entire line up of processing products and their energy efficiency from processors to graphics chips.
New AMD Platform Updates
Puma is AMD’s upcoming mobility platform that will include a new “Griffin” processor that is optimized for mobile computing, new hybrid graphics technology with DirectX 10 support with R600 GPUs, HD-DVD and Blu-ray support with AMD’s UVD technology and HyperFlash.
This CrossFire slide could be easily overlooked, but enthusiasts should pay attention! There are four GPUs in the middle there for a reason; quad-GPU configurations are coming, either for graphics, physics or GPGPU computing. AMD even took the time to mention the RD790 chipset as well as the upcoming system utility for the platform to enable overclocking and tweaking.
