Posted on Monday, June 30 2008 @ 23:40 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
TG Daily
believes AMD is getting back on track. The site has some information about the performance of two R700 dual-GPU graphics cards in 3DMark Vantage and says these cards, along with the AMD Phenom 9950, should be available within the next seven weeks or so. Additionally, the firm is also working hard to get its 790GX chipset and SB700 and SB750 southbridges on the market.
On the product side, AMD wants to regain influence in the enthusiast market with affordable, but highly overclockable processors - such as the upcoming Phenom 9950. AMD is apparently shooting for a 12,000 CPU score in 3DMark Vantage. However, we were not able to get any specifics about the overclock required to hit this point. Since current Phenoms are checking in at less than 10,000 scores, we would expect a 20% higher clock rate.
However, looking at AMD’s more and more marketed “balanced platform” approach and the continuing advance of GPUs in everyday computing should put AMD into a much improved market position soon.
AMD’s team in Austin managed to use two R700 dual-GPU graphic cards (four RV770 chips) to get a score of X12515. This was done with four GPUs, while Nvidia uses three GTX280 boards to achieve a similar score. The R700 boards were clocked at 778 MHz, while the GDDR5 memory was clocked at 980 MHz QDR (that's 3920 "MHz", or just 3.92 GigaTransfers/sec), we were told. This brought the total on-board video bandwidth to an impressive 250.8 GB/s.
