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AMD Shows Its Antic Treasure Island (ATI) MapChristmas comes sooner for AMD supporters |
By Alexandru Sima, Hardware Editor
2nd of October 2006, 12:46 GMT
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An AMD roadmap has been published by Planet3Dnow, quoted by The Inquirer, and it presents what the chip maker has been showing off to European resellers. According to the plan, AMD will introduce Windsor-cored Athlon 64 X2s during November. The Socket AM2 chips will be clocked at 2.8 GHz, 2.8 GHz and 3 GHz and named the Athlon 5400 , 5600 and 6000 . These are 90nm dual-core processors.
The first 65 nm Athlons based on the Brisbane core will appear in December if all goes to the roadmap schedule. These will be clocked at 2.1 GHz, 2.3 Ghz, 2.5 GHz and 2.6 GHz and labeled Athlon 64 X2 4000 , 4400 , 4800 and 5000 . Sempron also gets an October update
with the introduction of the 35 W 3500 and the 62 W 3800 . These are 90 nm Socket AM2 parts, clocked at 2 GHz and 2.2 Ghz.
In the meantime, AMD should finish the acquisition of ATI by the end of this month, and is just waiting for ATI's shareholders to meet as soon as they can and to vote the final "yes". The final engineers meeting at the real plans for what DAAMIT can do together will start after the completion of the process.
As for ATI's competitors, Nvidia is crawling in the "Race of the Shader", while ATI is about to launch its second-generation Unified Shader hardware and claims that it managed to totally eliminate vertex to pixel switching overhead, a problem that the developers have been struggling with for a while, and not only that, they developed Ashli (Advanced Shading Language Interface), too. Ashli provides the artist a framework for mapping arbitrary complex shaders onto graphics shading hardware, while alleviating resource limitations concerns.
Ashli is multi-lingual and supports a subset of the RenderMan, DirectX (HLSL) and OpenGL (GLSL). It operates on a program entity, which is a collection of shaders, destined for compilation. A RenderMan is a combination of any of displacement, surface, light, volume and imager shader types. HLSL and GLSL programs are composed of vertex and pixel (fragment) shaders. Incoming shaders are compiled to any of DirectX 9.0 Shader Models 2.0 and 3.0, and OpenGL ARB_vertex_program and ARB fragment program API's. Optionally, Ashli emits metafile in the Microsoft FX format, which encapsulates hardware shader segments and techniques. In addition, Ashli generates a formal text metadata structure that specifies the mapping of runtime appearance parameters onto hardware shader resources, such as input, constant, sampler and output registers.
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