Just got a new nForce420 motherboard.
Well, I was close. Those NVIDIA guys are faster than they look and I didn't quite make it out the door...
I was at the TeamAMD Roadshow in Houston last night. It was interesting, AMD is making a big push on screwdriver shops and they are providing a lot of support.
But that is not what you want to know, is it? Yeah, there was a nForce 420 on display, running a demo. Now I don't know if the demo was being run as a movie, or if it was being rendered on the fly, but if it is being rendered, then a nForce with high end Athlon is going to be the killer gaming platform. The interesting point of the demo is when the invisible girl sneaks up on the nasty guy with the gun, she sort of ripples and goes visible. She then jumps in the air, movement is stopped and there is the circular pan you see everywhere, and she kicks him. The action is very smooth and fluid and the detail is, well awesome. Again, if this is rendered on the fly, then games should make a quantum jump. In eye candy, I mean. Oh, and the surround sound is excellent. You can hear stereo easily, and the guy claimed that if there were 5 speakers you could hear it in full 3d. I got to talk to the techie guy, but only briefly. Got some juicy tidbits though. Let see, the 4.2GBytes per second is split evenly between the video and the CPU/everything else. I was hoping it was demand allocated with the GPU having the highest priority, but no dice. But the nForce chipset supports PowerNow! so a laptop could be built. It would be a battery eater though, the northbridge had a low-profile heatsink on it (no, they wouldn't let me touch it) so it probably pulls some power. However, he claimed that their mobile group is working on a laptop version and it should be out "soon". An interesting thing is that the techie guy was claiming that internally the northbridge was running at 6GBytes/second and they hope to get it up to 8. So faster FSB support is in the cards, just waiting for the DIMMs and AMD. nForce 420 motherboards should be out in the fall, that is all he would say. nForce 220 might be more imminent, the MSI guy was claiming a July ship date for their board. The MSI guy also is claiming their 760MP is going to be out at the end of this month, so much for Tyan having a several month exclusive, if true. Pricing has not been finalized.
AMD had a 760MP system with the Tyan board. They had dual 1.33GHz Palominos. Oddly enough, the SCSI drives were attached to a card in the PCI bus instead of the onboard connectors, they AMD guy said he was as baffled as anyone over that. Thought about trying for that one, but it was further from the door than the nForce one. Hmm, let's see, I asked about NUMA support for the Athlon since they showed that same old slide with 4 northbridges and 8 Athlons in a NUMA configuration. He said that AMD was looking at it, but API is developing a product. Sigh. They teased a bit about Hammers, particularly SledgeHammer. SledgeHammer is supposed to have a 128 bit wide memory bus and the Hammers will have a greater instructions per cycle(IPC) than Palomino. The wide memory bus makes sense, since the Sledge is supposed to be dual core, but the greater IPC is surprising since the Hammers are also supposed to have a deeper pipe. Let's see, they showed some roadmaps which I am deeply suspicious of. I don't think they are current, for example Barton is noticeable by it's absence. So I won't analyze the details.
There was some talk about mobiles, not a lot considering their target market. They are saying that there are a lot of machines that will be coming out soon. The ALi guy flatly said that laptops with their chipset are due at any minute, if they aren't out now. And it may be that some of the ones announced so far have that chipset since it supports both SDRAM and DDR.
Oh yeah, a representative of 3DPower was there and said the company will have an announcement about 3Dfx sometime today. Wish I knew what THAT was about. Anyway, we are supposed to check their website at 3dpower.com for the details. I checked earlier and there was nothing, but hope springs eternal... |
