First chipset promises Vista Premium experience without discrete graphics
card.
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 said. "Intel has never been successful at partnering or acquiring. This bodes well for the overall success of the ATI acquisition."