Now that the new AMD Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 graphics cards are out, it is fairly easy to determine the performance boost we can get in CrossFireX configurations.
I haven’t had an official product briefing with VIA in years. The last time I met with a representative from the company was two years ago outside of IDF in San Francisco. Before then, it was probably around 4 years.
VIA was the first casualty of integration in the PC space. Today we’re all talking about moving graphics onto the processor die, but a few years ago we were having similar discussions about moving the memory controller and north bridge on die. As a manufacturer of chipsets (north and south bridges) for CPUs, VIA lost relevance in the x86 CPU market as the need for a third party chipset maker faded.
VIA’s recent visit to me in Raleigh, NC had two purposes according to the company. One, to remind me that VIA was still around and to give me some face to face time with a VIA representative (appreciated). And two, to showcase VIA’s dual-core Nano platform and brand new integrated graphics chipset (intriguing).
For those of you who don’t know, Nano is VIA’s answer to Atom, except it came along long before Atom did. Just like Atom, Nano was designed in Texas but by VIA’s Centaur team - a microprocessor company it acquired several years back. Centaur’s speciality was low power microarchitectures, and Nano is exactly that.
We have been long waiting for Fallout: New Vegas: the first reports about the new part of the popular sequel surfaced back in February 2010. And today we are going to find out what the graphics card owners should expect to see in the new game.
G.Skill Company offered us their DDR3-2000 memory kit specially optimized for systems with AMD CPUs. Our today’s article is devoted to this G.Skill product and its performance.
Picking up immediately from where we left off yesterday with our review of NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 580, we have a second GTX 580 in house courtesy of Asus, who sent over their ENGTX580. With our second GTX 580 in hand we’re taking a look at GTX 580 SLI performance and more; we’ll also be taking a look at voltage/power consumption relationship on the GTX 580, and clock-normalized benchmarking to see just how much of GTX 580’s improved performance is due to architecture and additional SMs, and how much is due to the clockspeed advantage.
The GeForce GTX 480 and the associated GF100 GPU have presented us with an interesting situation over the last year. On the one hand NVIDIA reclaimed their crown for the fastest single GPU card on the market, and in time used the same GPU to give rise to a new breed of HPC cards that have significantly expanded the capabilities of GPU computing. On the other hand, like a worn and weary athlete finally crossing the finish line, this didn’t come easy for NVIDIA. GF100 was late, and the GTX 480 while fast was still hot & loud for what it was.
Furthermore GTX 480 and GF100 were clearly not the products that NVIDIA first envisioned. We never saw a product using GF100 ship with all of its SMs enabled – the consumer space topped out at 15 of 16 SMs, and in the HPC space Tesla was only available with 14 of 16 SMs. Meanwhile GF100’s younger, punchier siblings put up quite a fight in the consumer space, and while they never were a threat to GF100, it ended up being quite the surprise for how close they came.
Ultimately the Fermi architecture at the heart of this generation is solid – NVIDIA had to make some tradeoffs to get a good gaming GPU and a good compute GPU in a single product, but it worked out. The same can’t be said for GF100, as its large size coupled with TSMC’s still-maturing 40nm process lead to an unwieldy combination that produced flakey yields and leaky transistors. Regardless of who’s ultimately to blame, GF100 was not the chip it was meant to be.
But time heals all wounds. With GF100 out the door NVIDIA has had a chance to examine their design, and TSMC the chance to work the last kinks out of their 40nm process. GF100 was the first Fermi chip, and it would not be the last. With a lesson in hand and a plan in mind, NVIDIA went back to the drawing board to fix and enhance GF100. The end result: GF110, the next iteration of Fermi. Hot out of the oven, it is launching first in the consumer space and is forming the backbone of the first card in NVIDIA’s next GeForce series: GeForce 500. Launching today is the first such card, the GF110-powered GeForce GTX 580.