AMD organized a press conference to close the first day of the CeBIT. Besides the standard discourse, the manufacturer wanted to reassure us on its advances in the development of its 45 nm CPUs, and as we mentioned earlier, they conducted a demonstration of a quad core Shanghai (video encoding that didn’t entirely saturate the 4 cores).
A Shanghai wafer.AMD also wanted to reassure us on the Puma, its future mobile platform mobile which should finally arrive this summer. You may recall, it will be based on a new CPU and the 780 G chipset in its mobile version of course.
A working laptop based on the Puma platform.However, what stood out the most in their presentation was AMD’s strong insistence on the graphics aspect, first with the 780 G, which adds a big improvement compared to previous solutions, and then with CrossFire X. The latter is now available via a new driver which you may recall enables combining 3 or 4 graphic cards.
While the manufacturer stressed this point, we noticed the usual "Customer Centric" slogan being replaced by the "Ultimate Visual Experience" on most slides, it’s not without reason. This is more or less the only domain that allows it to set itself apart from Intel whose integrated cores can be short-winded and which often rely on poorly evolved drivers. AMD thus uses the 780 G to aggressively point out the poor performances of Intel’s integrated graphic cores as well as the absence of DirectX 10 support and HD video acceleration. So while waiting for more performance competitive CPUs, it’s in graphics that AMD will try and fend off its rival.
