AMD RS780 IGP to launch in January

Tuesday 11th December 2007, 08:00:00 PM, written by Arun

According to Digitimes, AMD's RS780 and RS740 IGPs (DX10 and DX9 respectively) will be launched in January. This is in contrast to earlier reports, which indicated a February launch for RS780 - so it looks to have been pulled in. NVIDIA's MCP78 is also slated for January, but it isn't clear which will come first.

Features

• MCP78 and RS780 will support Hybrid SLI and Hybrid CrossFireX respectively; both are basically the same thing and allow you to save power by disabling the discrete GPU completely when its performance is not required.
• Both can also enchance the performance of discrete GPUs; NVIDIA claims MCP78 can do so for any of their GPUs, while recent presentations have implied RS780 would do so only with RV610/RV620. Of course, performance benefits above the low-end would be negligible anyway.
• The specifications and performance of RS780 and MCP78 are expected to be nearly identical to those of RV620 and G98, respectively.

Chips and SKUs

• Digitimes also claims other variants based on RS780 will only be available in Q2. These includes MCP78D with the capability to run CrossFire in 2x8 PCI Express 2.0 mode, and MCP78C which is aimed at the 'mainstream'. Given RV620's die size, it might be reasonable to expect this chip to be slightly more than 80mm².
• RS740 presumably has the same setup as RS690, but shrunk to 55nm and with added support for PCI Express 2.0. Given that RS690 already was 49mm² on 80nm, we'll be curious to see how small this one is...
• However, unlike NVIDIA's current IGPs, RS690/RS740/RS790 alll require a separate southbridge, which adds an extra package and 35-40mm² of silicon. This makes it especially difficult to compare costs for the two companies' chipsets.

Discuss on the forums

amd ± rs780, rs740, mcp78

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