We sat down with AMD at CES to see what the company has in store for 2009, and find some things worth getting excited about.
While we wanted to get excited about AMD in 2008, the Phenom just didn’t do it, with benchmarks that sadly didn’t light our fire.
But things are looking more interesting for 2009, judging by what we’ve seen at CES in Las Vegas.
Both CPU vendors are here in force. The Intel booth is covered in Core i7, as well as wireless demos and Intel Atom and MID devices.
AMD’s message for CES is a multipronged strategy, combining Dragon and 45nm Phenom II on the desktop, the ATI Mobility Radeon 4000 series for notebooks, and a new notebook chip called “neo” which looks interesting indeed.
Saying hello to Core i7
While Intel pushes gaming in the form of a chip, AMD is again going with a fantasy theme – which may or not be a good thing, depending on whether you get excited about spiders and such, and whether CPU, GPU and chipsets and be boiled down to a single brand.
Last year this platform was called Spider, and this year it’s Dragon.
The special sauce that makes Dragon is:
- 45nm Phenom II
- ATI Radeon 4000 series
- AMD 7 series chipset (such as the 790)
By now you’ll have seen the first Phenom II benchmarks hitting the Web – and getting cautiously favourable writeups.
Whether Dragon can compete with Core i7’s multi-threaded abilities, which promises big gains once more threaded games appear, will make for an interesting battle in 2009.
Mobility Radeon 4000 Series
AMD has unveiled four tiers of Mobility Radeon 4000 series cards for laptops in 2009. At the top end this is the HD 4800 Series, while “thin performance laptops” get the HD 4600, and the 4300 is for thin and light notebooks. The “mainstream” card is the 4500/4300, which looks like being a good choice for 1080p playback rather than gaming.