To quote from The Register review on the AMD Phenom 9500, “It seems that 2008 is not going to be a good year for AMD”. Doesn’t sound to positive for the already in trouble AMD does it?
The Register have done a fantastic and lengthy review on the Phenom 9500, and though they liked it they said “AMD’s Phenom squares up for a fight with the Intel Core 2 Quad, but comes out with the bruises…” It means that if you are an AMD fanboy, you might want to wait till AMD can refine this processor class a little. They did give it a decent 75% rating, but I got a feeling it is more out of pity, then the processor itself. At least the new ATI’s are good.
For more info, click over to The Register.
One of the things that is always using more and more power as time goes on is your video card. There are even dedicated power supplies made especially for the purpose of powering your behemoth configurations. Didn’t the graphics card industry get the memo? We are suppose to be aiming to use less power!
That is exactly what ATI aim to do with a new Hybrid Crossfire system. The concept is very simple, when you don’t need high end gaming graphics, the top end card will be disabled, therefore saving power. When you need that power again it is there for the taking.
This concept has been done previously on Sony Vaio notebooks, with the ability to disable the addon Nvidia video card, and use the onboard Intel card. Difference this time, is it seems it is made for desktops and more focused at the people who want to lower the power bill for those PC’s (like mine) that are left on all the time.
ATI has shown off its capability to PC Perspective, with a test system containing a 2.2GHz Phenom processor, a RS780 (never heard of it) integrated graphics chipset and a RV620-based card labeled HD Radeon 3450. The configuration was quite impressive with frame rates of 30-35fps for Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3, which then jumped to around 55fps when hybrid mode was enabled.
AMD are aiming for a 2008 release, with the initial batch of hybrid CrossFire-capable cards to be priced around $50. It is not yet known whether it will be available in notebooks, but my magic 8 ball says the chances are good.
For more info, click over to the Engadget Blog.