If you look at the history of PC gaming and graphics, Intel and NVIDIA have always enjoyed an upper hand. But some time ago, AMD took over ATI and now finally the combination has come out with something that could deliver a sucker punch to Intel. Called as Spider, the avant-garde PC platform has been targeted at gamers and multimedia enthusiasts.
Well, what exactly is Spider? AMD touts the platform as the first true quad-core processor supporting scalable graphics for The Ultimate Visual Experience. It combines the power of Phenom quad-core processors, ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series graphics processors with Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support, AMD 7-Series chipsets with CrossFireX and AMD OverDrive software. It will offer gamers platform-level acceleration through co-processing.
Dirk Meyer, President & COO, AMD says, “AMD is the only company committed to delivering The Ultimate Visual Experience across all the screens of your life. The AMD Spider platform exemplifies our approach to platform-level innovation and delivers a highly-advanced, feature-rich enthusiast computing experience. Our dedication to energy-efficient design and manufacturing excellence drives an unprecedented performance-per-watt at an amazing price point, putting enthusiast-class platforms in reach for more users than ever before.”
Kelt Reeves, President, Falcon Northwest explains, “Falcon Northwest is particularly impressed with the quad ATI CrossFireX potential of the new AMD Spider platform. Running four graphics boards in one system has been a dream of gamers, but could be a nightmare for a system builder to get all those graphics cards proper airflow. The consistent nature of the Spider platform design allows the AMD 7-Series chipset, high-performing AMD Phenom quad-core processor, and the already cool and quiet ATI Radeon HD 3800 graphics cards to all be placed for maximum airflow and cooling. AMD has made massive multi-GPU performance easy to build, and affordable.”
AMD’s Spider platform will also offer best possible processing power for a scalable HD multi-GPU experience. Not only that, AMD Spider platform scales three or four graphics processors and delivers a true gaming supercomputer. As AMD Phenom processors have more system bandwidth, when combined with additional bandwidth of AMD PCI Express 2.0 chipsets and graphics processors, it gives multimedia enthusiasts smooth support for 1080P video playback, enhanced multi-GPU and high-speed disk and network interfaces. Spider also features ATI Avivo HD video engine and the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) as well as enhanced HDMI connectivity with integrated HDCP and audio for HDMI video.
Some details of AMD Spider’s Scalable Platform Performance: AMD’s Spider platform offers a new class of enthusiast platform scalability, with multiple upgrade options to increase performance and boost compatibility with configurations that can deliver an estimated two teraflops(1) of desktop processing power by harnessing four graphics processors. The multi-core design of AMD Phenom quad-core processors, based on Direct Connect Architecture, features an integrated memory controller designed to support memory speeds up to DDR2 1066, 128-bit floating point units and AMD’s Balanced Smart Cache for rapid access to memory, with a shared L3 cache for leading-edge performance on multi-threaded software.
Here are the details about the pricing:
AMD Phenom processors 9600 (2.3GHz) – $283 (approx. Rs. 11, 130)
AMD Phenom processors 9500 (2.2GHz) – $251 (approx. Rs. 9, 870)
ATI Radeon HD 3850 with 256MB of GDDR3 memory – $179 (approx. Rs. 7, 040)
ATI Radeon HD 3870 with 512MB GDDR4 memory – US $219 (approx. Rs. 8, 610).