AMD Tech Day: Second Half
Posted on 25 June 2008, at 4:50 pm, by Judie Lipsett
When we got back to the room, there was a cake waiting for one of the attendees…evidently Nick had spotted that it was Xavier’s birthday from his Facebook profile. See? There’s at least one valid use for social networking. 
Our first speaker was Ognjen (Augie) Brkic, who talked about Discrete Graphics inside notebook computers. His presentation included information on ATI Hybrid Graphics, and how performance and battery life are improved by the use of the new cross-bred system.
Then came the paydirt…!
Augie showed us the new ATI XGP Technology (eXternal Graphics Platform) which is an upgradeable desktop expansion device that allows ATI laptops to have full desktop GPU performance. This box also allows the user to up to 6 external monitors support…
It took two years to develop the special connector, and it is proprietary to AMD for one year, starting this August.
Pat Moorehead gave a presentation on Cinema 2.0 and what the future holds, including how graphics will eventually be holographic and 3D.
In anticipation of the processing needs of upcoming graphics, AMD has introduced the HD4800 Series which uses TeraFLOPS; and no, I had never heard that term before, either.
More info…
If you just bought a gaming graphics card, this one may make you want to break out your receipt and get a refund…
One of the more exciting aspects of the new technology is the ability to upscale to a high definition monitor without losing quality…
We watched a video showing the history of gaming graphics starting with Pong and ending with current video game graphics…as Pat pointed out, it is amazing how graphics even five years old are considered blocky and out of date.
We were given a demo of Ruby, which was about the most amazing gaming graphics I have ever seen. A demo will be going live on the web soon. Wow…just wow. Pat said that this is “Cinematic Computing,” and that the experts said it would be 2014 before this type quality was available. It’s here, now.
“Benchmarking Realities” was the topic presented to us by Mark Welker, and he wanted to cover real world benchmarking versus synthetic benchmarking.
It would seem that many times benchmark numbers mean absolutely nothing to the average consumer, because what they really want are accurate descriptions of what they can expect in their user experience. So the question becomes…How do you measure “good enough”? Is it when a computer feels “zippy”? What is the point where a computer is not zippy enough? What concessions are you willing to make to use a particular system or to avoid going larger, upgrading, or paying more?
One thing that Mark and several other speakers mentioned was watching CPU output when opening flash intensive sites such as Disney, American Idol, or Chrysler. If it’s not topping out or performance isn’t noticeably bogging down, then it is probably “good enough”
Rick Gayle, Senior Production Manager for Platform Planning, spoke to us on AMD’s Better By Design program…
“Better By Design” is AMD’s marketing program under which partnership criteria requirements are put in place to evaluate and select partners they will work with.
The results in the previous slide were not done with matched components
We then had a Q&A session which included (among other things) a particular way AMD will be optimizing Vista CPU budgets and unnecessary processes…coming soon.
After this session was over, we had the opportunity to play with many preproduction laptops in the room which were running Puma, several of which had Sins of a Solar Empire and Half Life2 loaded for testing. Sorry guys, I’m not a gamer, so I can’t really comment on whether they were running as well as they would have if on a loaded out desktop, but they looked pretty nice to me.
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June 25th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
It would be cool to see if Evernote would read those slides (graphics recognition is one of the big selling points)