AMD IS GEARING UP to launch three series of products for Q4'07. AMD Phenom, RD790 and RV670 are all supposed to arrive in at the same time.

And we managed to get the chance to play around with the demo machine AMD set up in cooperation with Sapphire.

Components placed in a huge case from Thermaltake...

AMD is calling its CPU+GPU+Chipset package "Spider", and the system we had in hand consisted of an AMD Engineering Sample CPU, clocked at AMD's standard engineering sample frequency, two RV670 cards and 2GB of Super Talent DDR2-1066 memory. The motherboard was Sapphire's own RD790 creation, albeit in first-generation form. Sapphire's second generation motherboard will ship at teh same time as the AMD parts, sporting features Sapphire is well known for.

AMD's quad-core Phenom was marked as Engineering Sample, causing some utilities not to recognise the processor

The processor for this system is no other than long-awaited Agena. TheCPU runs with no issues in Socket AM2 and AM2+ motherboards, HyperTransport 3 is up and running, but sadly, we could not run any benchmarks as far as CPU is concerned.

We wonder why AMD test systems are not running 64-bit Vista, but the 32-bit version with 2GB of memory is working just fine.

For an engineering sample, we did not experience any instabilities - this silicon worked just fine. The system is very responsive to any command given, but we could not check the speed of loading Windows Explorer when network drives are attached.

Sapphire's RD790 Motherboard

Tuning up the HyperTransport 3 all the way up to 2.6GHz each lane, or 5.3 GTransfers/s.

You can start cheering right away, since AMD decided to push the digital distribution of power (aka DVRM, Digital PWM) across the whole product range. In our talk with folk from Markham, we learned that such decision was made in order to have complete control over every aspect of the system, so that users could change every possible aspect from the motherboard, GPU or components tied to the motherboard.

Of course, this all depends on motherboard makers or AIBs implementing all of the features that Daamit has in store, but what we have seen - RD790 will be a tweaker's dream.

This board had small passive coolers on critical components, three PCIe 2.0 slots for graphics and a couple of PCI ones.

When it comes to PCI Express and the whole configurability, AMD's call to go digital with the reference design and now with Sapphire and DFI designs was absolutely the right one.

Manual control over how much watt with every PCIe 2.0 port get. If you max out the PCIe slot + PEG connector, this can give more juice.

If, for instance, motherboard vendors decide to implement PCIe control, the user will be able to completely control the way the PCIe slot works, from the electrical side to data. In a reference BIOS shown to us, we could change the amount of current available per slot. So, with three or four slots per motherboard, you can regulate how much power can go to a slot.

If your PSU can handle it, you can give up to 255 Watts just through the slot, 105W more than defined by the PCIe 2.0 standard. You can go as low as 25W (or even cut the power entirely, if you don't want to use the slot), so there will be no issues with compatibility with PCIe 1.0, 1.0a, 1.1 and 2.0 boards.

ATI RV670 graphics cards

Cards shown here had 2S cooler, and board remind us of X1950 with digital PWM

Now we come to the star of the show. We cannot believe that company had the balls to show off an unreleased product on WCG finals, but it seems that AMD is changing its ways. This was not the only thing they showed, but for that we'll do another article or two.

The RV670 shown here did not come marked "RV670XT" or "RV670XTX", just one of RV670 reference designs. The two boards worked in Crossfire, hidden in huge Thermaltake chassis. These boards had a dual-slot cooler, and power consumption is such that it can run just from the PCIe 2.0 slot alone. However, in order to keep the compatibility with PCIe 1.1 motherboards on the market, six-pin PEG connector was used.

We learned that no final clocks are set yet, but the boards that are here in Seattle worked at quite interesting clocks. Needless to say, this product is going to offer high-end performance for excellent price. We will have quite an interesting battle on our hands.

But to get back to the boards themselves, the design is something we would put between Radeon X1950 and 2600XT. 512MB of GDDR4 memory were used on the card, but the cards had no DisplayPort connectors. We had no means to measure the temperature, but you can keep the finger touching the back of the PCB in GPU area with no problem, even when 3D apps are running.

All in all, we have seen quite interesting display of engineering from ATI and AMD, now the only thing that remains is finalising the products, selling chips to partners and getting this complete package out the door.

We're reasonably sure that AMD will launch all three parts at the same time, but nothing is set in stone. µ