AMD Announces New AM1 Platform

AMD Announces New AM1 Platform

 AMD today announced the introduction of its AM1 platform featuring the AMD quad-core and dual-core "Kabini" APU into the component channel for system builders. Combined with motherboards from leading manufacturers, the new AM1 platform will deliver award-winning Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and AMD "Jaguar" CPU cores, and bear the AMD Athlon and AMD Sempron APU brands. This will create an ecosystem of flexible and upgradable platforms at compelling price points that also feature USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s support, and microATX and miniITX motherboards for sleek and power-efficient small form factor PCs.

 Availability of "Kabini" desktops and components are slated to be on-shelf in select regions beginning early April, with global availability expected on April 9.

 "AMD continues our APU technology leadership by introducing the AM1 platform with 'Socketed Kabini', an APU designed for the mainstream market," said Bernd Lienhard, corporate vice president and general manager, Client Business Unit, AMD. "The AM1 platform gives us a great opportunity to deliver a flexible infrastructure environment, and provides a multitude of options for consumers and system builders looking for upgradeability packed into an extremely affordable solution."

 "Socketed Kabini" allows for exceptional productivity, web browsing, and compute acceleration for the larger mainstream, emerging markets looking for outstanding value and performance at low power.

 The AMD AM1 platform delivers balanced computing with DirectX 11.2 and Windows 8.1 support to mainstream markets. In addition, motherboard manufacturers including, ASRock, ASUS, BIOSTAR, ECS, Gigabyte and MSI are poised to deliver a range of next- generation desktop motherboards based on socket FS1b. These motherboards will support the latest specifications of native USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s for AMD Athlon and Sempron-series APUs for the AM1 platform.

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 source: techpowerup.com

First Consumer Graphics Card With 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM

Sapphire Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X Unveiled – First Consumer Graphics Card With 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM

 Sapphire Technology’s upcoming Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X which would go on to become the first consumer graphics card with 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM has been leaked by Videocardz. The memory has doubled over AMD’s reference design which would result in better performance in high resolution gaming.

 The Sapphire Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X features the AMD Hawaii XT GPU sporting 2816 Stream processors, 176 TMUs, 64 Render back-ends and a 4 GB GDDR5 memory operating along a 512-bit bus interface. The core and memory frequencies were not mentioned but we are certain that the card would be clocked beyond the 1000 MHz mark for the core since the card is equipped with a non-reference PCB design which equates into greater stability and overclocking capabilities over the reference variant.

 The Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X is a leap over the Tri-X OC variant from Sapphire in terms of board power and cooling. The Tri-X OC comes with a reference design while the cooler is a beefy tri-fan dual slot heatsink with enough capability to cool the massive Hawaii chip. We are short of details regarding the PCB design at the moment but it would certainly be made of high quality components considering the premium price tag you *consumers will have to dish out for this product.

 Sapphire has taken a step forward in cooling with their VAPOR-X variant which in addition to the better fan tri-fan cooler which cools a large aluminum fin heatsink beneath it and houses several heatpipes, the Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X also features a massive backplate that helps cool down the memory chips and several heatshrinks do provide cooling to the MOSFETs beneath the PCB. The cooler is massive and may take three expansion slots space while installation so that would limit the use of four of these cards in CrossFireX unless you’re using a high-end E-ATX form factor motherboard with PCI-E slots stacked in the proper arrangement. Display outputs include Dual-DVI, HDMI and a Display port slot, price for the Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X is not confirmed yet but we can expect a huge premium over the $549 possibly going past the $799 mark. Launch is expected just around the corner as with other non-reference R9 290X products such as MSI’s Radeon R9 290X Lightning.

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 source: wccftech.com

Xbox One Patch Could Unlock GPU, But Will It Beat The PS4?

Xbox One Patch Could Unlock GPU,
But Will It Beat The PS4?

 The Xbox One GPU could be unlocked with a possible patch, but would the performance increase be enough to rival the PlayStation 4?

 In a related report by The Inquisitr, Microsoft is considering selling a cheaper $399 console by removing the Xbox One disc drive and increasing the size of the hard drive. The idea would be to force gamers to purchase digital games but some analysts think that’s a bad business strategy at this time.

 A PS4, Xbox One hardware comparison shows the two consoles are almost identical in most respects. They both have a 1.6 GHz 8-core Jaguar CPU, 8 GB of memory, a 500GB HDD,Blu-ray drive, WiFi, HDMI ports, and USB 3.0. But Sony chose to go with a GPU with significantly more streaming processors and also higher bandwidth GDDR5 memory. Microsoft, on the other hand, chose to offset the GDDR3 bandwidth with the Xbox One eSRAM, which offers both high bandwidth and low latency in a 32MB package attached directly to the CPU and GPU via a SoC design.

 While discussing the differences can get quite technical, long story short is that the Xbox One GPU offers a max of 1.33 TeraFLOPS/s versus the PS4 GPU performance of 1.84 TeraFLOPS/s. Xbox One provides 68.3 GB/s and 102 GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the PS4 once again wins with 176 GB/s. In practice, what these hardware differences mean is lower resolutions, performance, and sometimes slight tweaks to certain effects.

 Call Of Duty: Ghosts was famously limited to 720p on the Xbox One while the PS4 was able to handle the full 1080p experience. More recently, it was proven there were major differences between the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition for Xbox One and PS4.

 Unfortunately, it turned out to be an apples vs oranges comparison because two different studios did the ports and the Xbox One was framerate capped at 30 FPS while the PS4 was capped at 60 FPS. This means the average FPS results are useless for comparison, but the lowest, or minimum, framerate is another story. The Xbone posted 27 FPS while the PlayStation 4 was 32 FPS. Hands-on tests cite the Xbox One experience as being more consistent, leading some to wish their was an option on the PS4 version for a 30 FPS cap.

 Video: Tomb Raider Definitive Edition: PS4 vs. Xbox One Cut-Scene Frame-Rate Tests

 Assuming this particular scene isn’t being bottlenecked by the CPU, this also allows us to compare the Xbox One GPU and PS4 GPU at a point where they are both under stress. Despite the PS4 theoretically being much faster on paper the minimum results don’t show the expected difference. This either means the Xbox One is performing better than expected or the Tomb Raider game is indeed CPU bottlenecked. Some also claim the Xbox One drops down to 900p for certain cutscenes, which would explain a lot. There’s also the potential for optimization issues with the PS4′s LibGNM API but some developers claim the Xbox One driver is still in need of work, as well.

 This also brings up the potential for a Xbox One patch that unlocks the GPU from the Kinect. Apparently, Microsoft currently demands that eight percent of the GPU is reserved for Kinect video and another two percent for Kinect voice. This means that when a game doesn’t use the Kinect at all about 10 percent of the Xbox One GPU is sitting idle. Worse, one industry insider named Pete Todd claims Microsoft purposefully chose to go with a cheaper/slower GPU because of the cost of the Kinect although they couldn’t have known Sony was shooting so high with the PS4 GPU.

 Although this Xbox One patch hasn’t been confirmed or denied by Microsoft, it’s been said that game developers have been clamoring for access to the unlocked potential of the GPU. What do you think Microsoft should do?

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 source: inquisitr.com