By Nate Ralph
August 1, 2010

Nvidia and AMD’s GPU arms race continues unabated, and the “world’s fastest” moniker hangs in the balance. The latest salvo comes in the form of Nvidia’s latest flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX 580. Priced at $500 (as of 11/9/2010), the card sits right at the upper echelons of the graphics card market, aimed squarely at the enthusiasts who will suffer nothing but the best. And they’ll find speed in spades here: the GTX 580 is the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market today, sailing through our battery of tests with aplomb.

A Tale of Two Cards

Over a year ago Nvidia released their flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX 480. Built on Nvidia’s fledgling Fermi architecture, it was their first DirectX 11 graphics card. And it was quite a beast: a confluence of blistering performance and temperatures that generally topped the performance charts, but ultimately stumbled in light of AMD’s well-established DirectX 11 competition. With the GeForce GTX 580, Nvidia quite literally went back to the drawing board. The GPU inside the GTX 480 was re-tooled from the transistor level, as Nvidia worked to mitigate some of the power and temperature issues that plagued the card. As a result, the GTX 580 is quieter, cooler, and relatively more power efficient than its predecessor. Putting Fermi to the Test We pitted the GeForce GTX 580 against its predecessor, the GTX 480, and AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5970. A note about the Radeon HD 5970: while it is a single graphics card, it’s actually a pair of GPUs, sandwiched together. Synthetic benchmarks aren’t necessarily a barometer of real-world performance, but they’re handy for getting a solid idea of how cards stack up. This is particularly true for the Unigine Heaven benchmark. This strenuous DirectX 11 test is laden with geometry-heavy scenes and tessellation — the Fermi architecture’s bread and butter. The GTX 580 takes a decisive lead, ousting even the HD 5970’s ample muscle. While the Radeon HD 5970 clambers back into the lead on the 3DMark Vantage benchmark, it isn’t ahead by very much — 7%, on the Extreme setting. That’s not a bad showing from the GTX 580’s single-GPU. Our gaming tests saw a bit more of the same. The dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 maintains a near constant lead, with the GTX 580 nipping at its heels. The Dirt 2 Demo’s results were the outlier here, with Nvidia’s GTX 580 pulling ahead by as much as 80% over the Radeon HD 5870. It maintained a steady lead over the Radeon HD 5970 by up to 40%.

With Great Power, Comes Great Efficiency

The GTX 480s chief faults lay in its unwieldy power demands, and Nvidia has gone a long way to rectifying that issue. AMD’s Radeon HD 5870 is (unsurprisingly) the least demanding of the cards we looked at, but the GTX 580 managed to shave 20W off of its predecessor’s idle and full load power ratings. The improvement shows once we take performance per watt into account. The Radeon HD 5970 takes the lead as the most efficient card, but the GTX 580 makes dramatic strides over its predecessor, overtaking even the venerable Radeon HD 5870. Fermi, Done Right Nvidia was late to the DirectX 11 game, and the GTX 480 ultimately failed to make much of a splash. But an extra six months in the proverbial tool shed has resulted in quite a showpiece. The GeForce GTX 580 is everything the GTX 480 should’ve been, but it’s still saddled with some of the same problems. There’s still no answer for AMD’s Eyefinity technology — if you want to run three (or more) monitors, you’ll still need to pick up a second GTX 580. The GTX 580 also lacks a DisplayPort connector, offering up a pair of DVI connectors and a mini-HDMI port instead — AMD’s cards offer the full gamut.

DisplayPort concerns aside, Nvidia has managed an impressive feat. An unwieldy titan was reforged, delivering a component that outpaces the competition, and earns the vaunted “world’s fastest” moniker.

AMD has introduced the next generation of PC gaming, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series, designed to be “perfect graphics cards” for gamers by delivering unprecedented game performance starting at $179 SEP. The new AMD Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards provide more than 30 percent greater game performance than competing products, harnessing AMD’s second-generation Microsoft DirectX 11-capable architecture, best-in-class energy efficiency, and an unmatched feature set, including AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology. The AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 series is available immediately from etailers worldwide.

“AMD is the market share leader by a landslide in DirectX 11 graphics,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, GPU Division, AMD. “Through our sweet spot strategy and our open, industry standards approach, we’ve worked to deliver the best possible experience for gamers. Today, our laser focus on gamers continues with the introduction of what we think is far and away the best graphics card series today, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series. With exceptional game performance, an unrivaled feature set including breathtaking DirectX 11 gaming, AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology, AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing, and more, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series will have all gamers wanting to get Radeon in their systems.”

“One of the great advantages of PC gaming is the rapid pace at which the experiences evolve and improve, and the AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 series delivers on the promise of DirectX 11 gaming with significantly improved visuals and enhanced performance,” said Craig Owens, marketing director, EA. “With Medal of Honor, EA is pushing the boundaries of gaming technology to deliver a whole new online experience, and it only makes sense that we leverage the latest DirectX 11 technology supported by AMD Radeon graphics cards to deliver an amazing experience for gamers.”

With the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series, AMD aims to recreate the same incredible value proposition of the original “sweet spot” products, the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards. Taking full advantage of AMD’s experience with DirectX 11, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series is AMD’s second-generation DirectX 11-enabled chip designed to deliver more than 30 percent greater game performance over the closest competing products in their class and even faster tessellation for a more realistic gaming experience. The AMD Radeon HD 6800 series’ architectural efficiency and advances in power management technology deliver in best-in-class energy efficiency.

AMD Radeon 6800 series graphics cards feature improved image quality, including all-new morphological anti-aliasing compatible with DirectX^® 9, DirectX 10, or DirectX 11 applications, and improved anisotropic filtering.
DirectX11 has quickly become the new standard for PC games. The majority of game developers chose AMD Radeon graphics cards as their development platform of choice for their DirectX 11 games, and today AMD continues to enjoy strong relationships with those developers and many more. Beyond DirectX 11 games, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series also delivers an exceptional game play experience in DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL titles in single card or multi-card AMD CrossFireX configurations.

The AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 series graphics cards are the first in the industry to offer support for both DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a, providing PC users with expanded options for multi-monitor configurations, display selection, and new DisplayPort audio features.

AMD Eyefinity technology continues to be the most affordable multi-display solution available, offering incredible choice in display compatibility and configurations. More than 45 game titles have been AMD Eyefinity-validated or are AMD Eyefinity-ready titles, and there are hundreds of more games that are AMD Eyefinity-compatible. Additionally, continuing improvements to AMD Catalyst graphics drivers may unlock new functionality and flexibility in AMD Eyefinity features and configurations.

With the AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 series graphics cards, AMD is introducing AMD HD3D technology, the result of our open 3D initiative for stereo 3D gaming and movies. AMD HD3D technology supports over 400 titles through its partners, and AMD’s open 3D ecosystem approach encourages the broadest selection of 3D solutions, available at the most affordable cost.

The AMD Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards is supported by a dozen add-in-board companies, including ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GIGABYTE, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), MSI, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology, VisionTek and XFX.

At the 6^th Annual AMD Technical Forum & Exhibition (TFE) 2010, AMD has showcased for AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) codenamed “Llano”, designed for notebook, ultrathin and desktop PCs.  AMD demonstrated the accelerated single-chip processing muscle of Llano by simultaneously processing three separate compute-and graphics-intensive workloads.

“The serial and powerful parallel processing capability of the Llano APU has the potential to make OEMs and consumers re-think their computing experience,” said Chris Cloran, corporate vice president and general manager, client division, AMD. “The experience potential of Llano is truly incredible, and the demos we showed today on stage provide a glimpse of what this processor is capable of delivering in sleek form factors with long battery life.  Everything consumers love about their digital lifestyles today – social networking, gaming, consuming and creating media – can be enhanced with Llano, enabling a more interactive, vivid and immersive experience.”

The Llano APU demo showed three compute-intensive workloads simultaneously on Microsoft Windows 7, including calculating the value of Pi to 32 million decimal places, and decoding HD video from a Blu-Ray disc. Running concurrent to the CPU and HD video playback applications, Microsoft’s nBody DirectCompute application is shown achieving around 30 GFLOPS (as reported in the application) a relative measure of the available capacity to post-process video during playback, play a DirectX11 game, or assist the CPU cores to accelerate a non-graphics application. The demonstration represents a preview of Llano’s raw compute power enabling new levels of experience computing that AMD aims to bring to mainstream PC users in 2011.

Held annually in Taiwan, the AMD Technical Forum & Exhibition is an ecosystem partner event that focuses on addressing the world’s most complex technology challenges, and spotlighting technology breakthroughs.  Exhibitors span academia, hardware and software industries, fostering a healthy, open ecosystem for the AMD Fusion family of APUs.

For more information, visit http://fusion.amd.com.

NEW YORK – Advanced Micro Devices plans to announce its second-generation of DirectX 11 graphics cards this week, and also to show off its latest hybrid Fusion chip as the company tries to jump ahead of rivals Intel and Nvidia.

AMD on Friday will announce the Radeon HD 6800 family of graphics cards, which will be the first in the Radeon HD 6000 series, according to a company spokesman. The product will lose its ATI moniker, killing a brand name synonymous with graphics enthusiasts for around 25 years.

DirectX 11 graphics processors bring improved graphics and realistic images to PCs with the Windows 7 OS. The new graphics cards will replace the company’s existing 5000 family, released by the company last year as its first DirectX 11 graphics cards. The 6800 cards will compete with Nvidia’s latest Fermi offerings, which also support DirectX 11.

The company did not provide further comment on the products. However, one online retailer, Krex, has already listed an Asus graphics card based on the AMD’s Radeon 6870 graphics processor. The Asus EAH6870 graphics card is overclocked to 913MHz and has AMD’s Eyefinity technology, which allows six monitors to be connected to a single graphics card.

In an earnings conference call last week, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said the company hopes to ship thousands of Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards over the next few months.

AMD also provided a sneak peek to its upcoming Llano chip for desktops and laptops, which combines a CPU and DirectX 11 GPU on one chip. The chip, which was demonstrated at the AMD Technical Forum and Exhibition in Taipei, belongs to the next-generation Fusion family of chips that could help build lighter, sleeker and more power-efficient PCs.

The graphics processor will be able to decode Blu-ray video at the same time the CPU is running an intense math application, the company said. But the CPU and GPU will also work together to accelerate certain non-graphics and data-intensive applications, according to the company.

The chip is expected to have four CPUs running at speeds over 3.0GHz. The chip will reach users in 2011, but AMD has not yet provided a specific date on when it will appear in PCs.

AMD’s rival Intel has already started shipping hybrid laptop and desktop chips that combine the CPU and GPU. The chips, based on a new microarchitecture called Sandy Bridge, will appear in computers early next year.

Intel’s chips will ship ahead of AMD’s Llano chips. However, Meyer said that Intel’s Sandy Bridge chips do not support DirectX 11, which gives its Fusion chips an edge in graphics performance.

SAN FRANCISCO – Toshiba is the latest laptop vendor to fall victim to overheating technology. The recall of approximately 41,000 laptops resulting from more than 100 reports of melting laptop cases and minor injuries follows similar issues and recalls from other laptop manufacturers, and illustrates the problem with cramming so much processing power into such a small space.

According to a US Consumer Product Safety Commission bulletin, Toshiba is recalling Satellite T135, Satellite T135D and Satellite ProT130 notebook computers because “The notebook computers can overheat at the notebook’s plug-in to the AC adapter, posing a burn hazard to consumers.”

If this feels déjà vu its because it is a relatively common occurrence these days for laptops. In July Sony issued a recall of more than half a million Vaio laptops. Mike Lucas, senior vice president of Vaio for Sony, said in a statement “In rare instances, these notebook computers may overheat due to a potential malfunction of the internal temperature management system, resulting in deformation of the product’s keyboard or external casing, and a potential burn hazard to consumers.”

The Sony recall was immediately following an HP recall of laptop batteries in May. HP recalled over 100,000 laptop batteries in all as a result of mounting reports that the batteries were overheating, rupturing, and posing a risk of injury to users.

While quality control during the engineering and manufacturing process at Toshiba, Sony, and HP is apparently lacking, the issue goes beyond the individual manufacturers and exemplifies problems associated with the demands placed on notebook computers.

Heat is a fact of life with computers. A significant chunk of the cost of implementing and maintaining a data center is wrapped up in keeping the room at a tolerable temperature. Try turning off all of the computer equipment in your office or home and see how quickly the temperature drops.

Processors run hot. Batteries produce a significant amount of heat. The engineering of the internal components of the laptop are critical to provide adequate airflow for the fan to do its job and expel the heat from the case, but that is increasingly difficult as manufacturers work to make smaller, thinner notebooks cramming even more heat-generating components into a smaller space.

Thankfully, Intel and AMD have developed new processor technologies that incorporate more functions onto a single chip. Combining the core processing and graphics processing onto one chip instead of two greatly reduces the power consumption and heat output for newer laptops.

AMD has announced the appointment of Donald Newell as vice president and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Server. A distinguished engineer with more than 20 patents filed, Newell previously served as a senior principle engineer leading the System-on-Chip (SoC) and datacenter networking architecture groups within Intel Labs before joining AMD to lead its server roadmap and platform design programs.

As AMD Server CTO, Newell is responsible for the concept and definition of AMD’s long-term server roadmap based on current conditions, expected demand and long-term server trends. He is leading multiple worldwide teams and working alongside other AMD design and development teams to ensure successful transition of programs from design to market availability. Newell reports to Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group.

“Don Newell brings a strong combination of leadership skills, engineering and design expertise, and strategic direction,” said Bergman. ” We’re fortunate to have Don on board as we prepare for the delivery of the “Bulldozer” core in our AMD Opteron processors, scheduled for launch in 2011.”

During his 16 years with Intel, Newell led development of both SoC and server platform architecture innovations for areas ranging from cloud computing to hand-held devices. Newell also initiated and drove the I/O Acceleration Technologies (IOAT) from initial research to product intercept, developed a detailed architecture for heterogeneous computing and was responsible for delivering the PC industry’s first Digital TV receiver. He led his team to publish seminal papers on areas such as Cache QoS and network protocol processing. Newell has been published in more than 60 peer-reviewed research journals and publications and is a co-author of the IETF RFC2429 that specifies how video is transported over the Internet. Prior to joining Intel, he was a software engineer for first Datanex Software and later Sequent Computers. Newell received a Bachelors of Science from the University of Oregon.