The AMD platform gets a big boost in the form of external GPUs, and a stunning Cinema 2.0 demo that had us impressed.
The AMD Puma launch was more interesting for the bits around Puma than for Puma itself. There were a bunch of goodies from Lasso to Cinema 2.0, including a clip of the 770 'Ruby' demo.
The biggest news of the show was Lasso, now called AMD XGP technology, and it is a killer app for notebooks. It is an external PCIe2.0 8x breakout box that you can put a full blown GPU in. You can put a full 3870, soon 4870, into it and game on your notebook without giving up much.
The XGP box can do Crossfire, so you can theoretically do 3 way on a notebook. Also, since it is fully PCIe2.0 compliant, you can render on the external box and pass back to the notebook just like a normal card.
This concept was really done right, in addition to the GPU, the XGP box also has USB ports on it, and they are passed over the same cable. Multi-monitors, gaming, Crossfire and the rest, what's not to love? The answer is of course Vista, but that is another topic.
OK, it is a topic for now because MS had the next speaker up trying to show how the Broken OS wasn't actually broken. They failed, but did so in full view of a few hundred reporters and VIPs. The idea was the new 780M chipset has amazing graphics power and can do multiple HD streams. It actually can.
MS put up the broken OS with an HD stream as the desktop background. So far so good. Then they added a 720p movie playing in a window. Not bad yet. Then they added a game running in 'HD', whatever that means, and started flipping through screens with alt-tab. It was skipping like mad, broken like the OS. Moral 1 - Don't do three 'HD' things at once on Vista. Moral 2 - Don't use Vista.
The next ATI demo
This was followed by what was touted as AMD's next demo, tied in with their upcoming Cinema 2.0 initiative. Instead of Ruby jumping out of planes, they showed a street scene. It looked quite average until they said it was all CG and rendered in real time. Then it became impressive. Look for more on this in a few weeks.
The last bit was one we all new was coming, a mobile 3870 GPU. This completes the trio of mobile parts, and should give notebooks a real kick in the pants for graphics. One really nice touch is that you can switch between the integrated and 3870 on the fly without rebooting.
Overall, it was a really strong showing for reasons other than the main platform. The features listed are all saddled with the broken OS, a major downer, but still have a lot of inherent goodness to them. Intel may have the CPU side of mobile down, but today shows they have a lot of catching up to do on everything else.