eTeknix Tech Review Of 2011

Quarter 2 – eTeknix Tech Review of 2011

April: AMD board partners get existing boards ready for AM3+while AMD  launches the HD 67X0 cards

The hype around Bulldozer had been generated months before April 2011 but 2011 was when things really started to escalate. AMD’s major board partners, MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS all started releasing details of imminent BIOS updates which would allow existing AM3 boards to support upcoming AM3+ processors. This was perhaps the most active AMD had been all year in terms of promoting its next generation of processor. In addition to this AMD was also busy in the graphics market launching no less than three new graphics cards all targeting the mid range market: the HD 6750, HD 6770 and HD 6790 with the latter being an overclocked version of the HD 6770 as both contained the same number of Radeon cores – 800. All the cards packed 1GB of GDDR5 as standard and pricing begun at about £80 and upwards.

May: AMD partners debut 990FX motherboards whilst Intel hits back with the introduction of Z68

May 2011 was a month of new chipsets, Intel came out with their Z68 chipset and AMD with their 990FX chipset. Intel’s Z68 arrived first, hitting the media on the 11th of May and bringing with it a whole range of features and functionality that the Sandy Bridge platform needed. The first major change was essentially a combination of both H67 and P67 features, you could now overclock your CPU whilst still being able to use onboard graphics. In addition to this Intel added their Rapid Storage Technology which included a few things mainly the fact you could now use Intel’s SRT or Smart Response Technology. For those of you who are unaware SRT allows a small SSD (less than 64GB) to be used in conjunction with a large primary mechanical hard drive to cache it and make it work a lot faster, this essentially allows users to get close to SSD speeds without spending large amounts for a high capacity SSD. AMD’s 990FX chipset launch came at the end of May and was nowhere near as exciting. The only real change on AMD’s behalf was native support for the upcoming 8 core Bulldozer CPUs including support for a faster Hyper Transport speed, version 3.1 now over version 3, and the inclusion of licensed SLI support which is something the AMD platforms had been lacking for quite a while.

June: AMD launches desktop APUs under the codename Llano while Nvidia dominate the mobile GPU market with the launch of the GTX 580M

The APU or Accelerated Processing Unit believe it or not has only been with the desktop market now for about 7 months as of writing this. Fusion has been around for a while but the APU as we know it, under the Llano codename, was first introduced in June. The APU was introduced officially on the 30th of June and shook up the whole computer market quite a bit. Able to offer discrete class graphics with HD 6000 series chips built onto either dual, triple or quad core 32nm Llano processors. All of that in one package made for a huge simplification of the computer building process and gave better performance. The APU was widely received very well by most reviewers and certainly offers a lot of design wins of Intel CPUs when you do direct comparisons of price and performance: i.e you can get a quad core APU with discrete class graphics compared to a dual core Intel CPU with integrated level graphics.

Nvidia were also quite busy in June, coming out with the GTX 580M. On release the GTX 580M boasted the title of the fastest single mobile GPU on the planet with equivalent performance to the GTX 560Ti 384 Core desktop card except with a smaller power consumption of about 100W. The GTX 580M would remain the fastest mobile graphics card until AMD later release the HD 6990M.