MicroTechXP

AMD used the Computex show in Taipei this week to propose XGP - eXternal Graphics Platform, a slimline box you connect your GPU-lite laptop to when you need more graphics horsepower.
Fujitsu Siemens (FSC) was on hand to demo the concept with its Amilo GraphicBooster, an AppleTV-like unit with an AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 GPU built in and hooked up to 512MB of GDDR 3 memory. The box can drive four displays simultaneously, the company claimed.
AMD’s pitch is that users will be able to connect their slim’n'light laptops to an XGP, which will supply the level of graphical grunt that they don’t need when they’re on the move and, more importantly, running on battery power.

View: The full story @ The Reg

AMD has launched several new graphics solutions for notebooks and new processors for servers – the ATI XGP (external graphics platform) technology, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800, the ATI PowerXpress, and the quad-core Opteron 1300 series. XGP technology, a new external PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 graphics platform, is designed to deliver enthusiast-class desktop graphics performance and true multimedia upgradeability to notebooks, according to the company.
ATI XGP capitalizes on PCIe 2.0 to deliver graphics via a connected cable to an externally powered and cooled device, delivering up to 4.0Gb/s bandwidth in each direction between the notebook and external graphics. XGP is fully optimized for new AMD Turion X2 Ultra (Puma) notebook platforms, which AMD also announced.
View: The full story @ DigiTimes

Doug Friedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, said that graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. could well acquire x86 microprocessor maker Adv anced Micro Devices in order to “re-architect it”. The acquisition is considered to be useful due to the fact that roadmaps of AMD and Intel Corp. threat Nvidia. The only problem for the graphics giant is that AMD’s x86 license is a non-transferable one.
“We believe AMD [could] face mounting pressure from shareholders, to restructure the company with a focus on a change in leadership,” said the analyst. Indeed, shareholders of AMD are hardly pleased with the company’s performance in the recent quarters as well as issues with the launch of quad-core microprocessors and the release of DirectX 10 graphics processing units. Nevertheless, late last year AMD managed to secure $622 million from Mubadala Development Company, which means that there are those who believe in AMD. [Xbit-Labs]

AMD reached its lowest share price for more than four years last week and, as a result, its market value dropped to around US$5 billion – that’s $400 million less than it paid for ATI in July 2006.
Intel, AMD’s major competitor in the CPU business, has been on a roll for the past 18 months and is now worth around US$162 billion, which makes the chip giant more than 32 times the size of AMD in monetary terms.
Even worse for AMD is that its partner-cum-archrival, Nvidia, has a market cap of around $19 billion, which makes it almost four times as valuable as the struggling platform company.
It’s fair to say things haven’t been going well for AMD since the middle of last year, as its two major rivals launched products that remain largely uncontested even today. Neither the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 nor the GeForce 8800 GTX have been truly surpassed in terms of performance yet and it’s not going to happen until next year. [Bit-tech.net]

After being late to market with high-performance graphics offerings for a number of times, ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, is reportedly considering high-end graphics solutions that utilize more than two or, perhaps, even more physical dice. The method has been successfully utilized by Intel Corp., but will it be feasible for graphics processors too?
ATI Radeon HD 2900 (R600) graphics chip, which contains about 700 million of transistors had power consumption of 160W, or even more, but still did not manage to demonstrate performance on par with Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, a solution that also demands high amount of power and is rather expensive to manufacture. But ATI Radeon HD 3800 (RV670) graphics processing unit (GPU), which is made using 55nm process technology, has the same amount of horsepower as R600, but is cheaper to build and consumes less amount of energy.
View: The full story @ Xbit-labs

Microsoft has announced the details of its new DirectX version; to ensure full support one need not only to install Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista but may also need to replace a graphics card. Contemporary graphics accelerators from Nvidia GeForce 8800 and AMD/ATI Radeon 2900 may not support all the new features added to Direct3D 10.1. The features of DirectX 10.1 include incremental improvements to 3D rendering quality. As for the innovations, among them are 32-bit floating-point operations (instead of 16-bit ones, used today by default) and obligatory support of 4x FSAA.
Microsoft’s Sam Glassenberg did however note that “DirectX 10.1 fully supports DirectX 10 hardware. No hardware support is being removed. It’s strictly a superset. It’s basically an update to DirectX 10 that extends the hardware functionality slightly.” Glassenberg says DirectX 10.1 will be fully compatible with all graphics cards supporting DirectX 10. All the company wants to do now is to increase the API life cycle. Sam confirmed that existing graphics cards may still not be able to use all the new features of DirectX 10.1 but also stressed that applications designed specifically for DirectX 10.1 are very unlikely to appear, because overall, the updates aren’t that critical. [Xbit Laboratories]

Dell knows it won’t happen overnight, but along side wanting to ship audio/video codecs, Intel Wireless 80.211N support for Linux, Broadcom Wireless for Linux, and being able to ship notebooks and desktops with Compiz Fusion enabled, Dell would like to see improved ATI Linux drivers. At Ubuntu Live 2007, Amit Bhutani had a session on Ubuntu Linux for Dell Consumer Systems, where he had shared a slide with Dell’s “area of investigation”,  which Amit had said is essentially their Linux road-map. Amit had also stated that the NVIDIA 2D and 3D video drivers were “challenges in platform enablement”. Dell wants to offer ATI Linux systems, but first the driver must be improved for the Linux platform (not necessarily open-source, but improved). Dell currently ships desktop Linux systems with Intel using their open-source drivers as well as NVIDIA graphics processors under Linux. Amit had went on to add that new Dell product offerings and availability in other countries will come later this summer.

News Source: phoronix.com

Today (25 June 2007) Ati/AMD released a new version of its drivers for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Version 7.6 of the Catalyst drivers bring many bug fixes with its 34.6 MB download. The download comes with: Display Driver, Catalyst Control Center, and WDM Drivers.

View: Changelog
Download: Ati Catalyst 7.6
News Source: In-House