AMD has unveiled
its first chipset since last year's ATI acquisition.
At a company event in San Francisco, Dave Orton, executive vice
president of AMD's visual and media business touted the new AMD 690
chipset as the first hardware platform that is specifically
designed to provide users with a Windows Vista Premium
experience.
"It's not just graphics," Orton said. "It's graphics and high
definition video. Can the platform decode HD stream in real time
and display them on the screen? That's what the 690 brings to the
table."
Windows Vista Premium is known for its high demands on graphics
cards, as well as demanding for more system memory that Windows
XP.
A chipset is a collection of microchips that support the central
processor. It controls how information travels between the CPU and
other components of a computer.
AMD's new chipset incorporates an ATI Radeon X1250 graphics
processor to enable demanding graphics features in Vista's Aero
user interface such as 3-D application switching. Users that demand
high end graphics can purchase a discrete graphics card.
Although AMD touted the chipset as the first to come out of the
merge AMD and ATI businesses, industry analyst Nathan Brookwood
with Insight
64 cautioned that design work for its had started long before
the acquisition as part of a regular partnership. The ability for
the two to jointly create an advanced chipset however bodes well
for the further integration of the two companies.
"AMD has been able to form effective relationships with companies
of their size and bigger," Brookwood told vnunet.com. "Intel has
never been successful at partnering or acquiring. This bodes well
for the overall success of the ATI acquisition."