Lasso becomes XGP
THE AMD PUMA launch was more interesting for the bits around Puma than for Puma itself. There were a bunch of goodies from Lasso to Cinema 2.0, including a clip of the 770 'Ruby' demo.
The biggest news of the show was Lasso, now called AMD XGP technology, and it is a killer app for notebooks. It is an external PCIe2.0 8x breakout box that you can put a full blown GPU in. As you can see, you can put a full 3870, soon 4870, into it and game on your notebook without giving up much.
The XGP box can do Crossfire, so you can theoretically do 3 way on a notebook. Also, since it is fully PCIe2.0 compliant, you can render on the external box and pass back to the notebook just like a normal card.
AMD XGP external GPU on a Fujitsu Siemens Laptop
This concept was really done right, in addition to the GPU, the XGP box also has USB ports on it, and they are passed over the same cable. Multi-monitors, gaming, Crossfire and the rest, what's not to love? The answer is of course Vista, but that is another topic.
OK, it is a topic for now because MS had the next speaker up trying to show how the Broken OS wasn't actually broken. They failed, but did so in full view of a few hundred reporters and VIPs. The idea was the new 780M chipset has amazing graphics power and can do multiple HD streams. It actually can.
MS put up the broken OS with an HD stream as the desktop background. So far so good. Then they added a 720p movie playing in a window. Not bad yet. Then they added a game running in 'HD', whatever that means, and started flipping through screens with alt-tab. It was skipping like mad, broken like the OS. Moral 1 - Don't do three 'HD' things at once on Vista. Moral 2 - Don't use Vista.
The next ATI demo
This was followed by what was touted as AMD's next demo, tied in with their upcoming Cinema 2.0 initiative. Instead of Ruby jumping out of planes, they showed the street scene pictured above. It looked quite average until they said it was all CG and rendered in real time. Then it became impressive. Look for more on this in a few weeks.
The last bit was one we all new was coming, a mobile 3870 GPU. This completes the trio of mobile parts, and should give notebooks a real kick in the pants for graphics. One really nice touch is that you can switch between the integrated and 3870 on the fly without rebooting.
Overall, it was a really strong showing for reasons other than the main platform. The features listed are all saddled with the broken OS, a major downer, but still have a lot of inherent goodness to them. Intel may have the CPU side of mobile down, but today shows they have a lot of catching up to do on everything else. ยต
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Just thought I'd paste this here:



Dear Hillary, 

I wanted you to be one of the first to know: on Saturday, I will hold an event in Washington D.C. to thank everyone who has supported my campaign. Over the course of the last 16 months, I have been privileged and touched to witness the incredible dedication and sacrifice of so many people 

It's Offical at 3:49 AM Today. You know Free Press, to express power often shucks public & Shucked Hillary right out of White House, as Super Delegates are NOT Pledged, yet One Hillary Decided to Support Gob Press notion & ends rest of War, Which Hillary very likely would of Won at Convention Time.
Hillary von Drashek
Stop bashing vista. Its getting boring... Its teh bestest OS M$ has done to date. Im sorry it wont run on your 386. If youd actually used it, id bet you like it.
Somebody should fix the missing image issue here.
Where is the queue for those laptops?
Fools! In fact it was I, Hector Ruiz, who recorded that footage on a humble camcorder! You'll believe anything we tell you because you're so desperate for an AMD recovery and you think we won't stoop any lower than we already have. Well guess again - camcorders are part of our "asset-light" strategy.
What kind of port it will use?
The bandwidth is 4gb/s in each direction, which would make it only PCIe 1.1 spec.
Which would make it x16 lanes not x8.
I beleive when it talks about PCIe 2.0 it specifies the external PCIe connector specification, that AMD has created here with their propriatary port.
That is my understanding of the ATI news realease.
Dear huoh,

I'm actually using the broken OS and I don't like it. I'm running four cores on four gigahurts with eight gigs of one gigahurts memory so its not nearly as slow as an 386, and I still don't like it.

Most of the time, especially after startup I have no Idea what the broken OS is doing with my HDDs. All indexing services are off, but the disks keep on working. Other than that, my CPU is oscillating between 2 and 8% usage even if I'm not doing anything and all background apps are off. Other than that, right after installation I open the task manager and more than one gig of memory is used.

So tell me why I should like an OS I don't even know what it is doing...

I agree that from many aspects this OS is much better then anything MS has done till now (maybe except MS DOS 6.22), but from many aspects it's much worse than...

So If you'd not only use your system for playing solitaire, WOW and COD2, you wouln't probably write something stupid like this.