AMD shows off DX11 silicon

AMD GAVE COMPUTEX VISITORS a bit of a treat this morning in Taipei at its press conference by showing off the world's first demo of DX11 graphics silicon, which is suspected to be the forthcoming RV870 GPU.

The demo, aptly dubbed "Knight" - as in AMD's knight in shining armour we assume - was probably the biggest news to emerge from AMD in awhile and was all the more special for its heavy use of tessellation technology, which apparently allows for more realistic and detailed surfaces.

Both TSMC and Global Foundries reps were present at the event, although, sadly, both firms were on their best behaviour, so there were no daggers drawn at dawn in Taipei today.

TSMC presented its new DX11 wafer - probably in a desperate bid to assert its confidence that it can indeed deliver the goods with its leaky 40nm process.

Tom Sonderman of GloFo flashed his firm's latest wares around, presenting AMD senior VP Pat Patla with an Istanbul wafer. Sonderman also gave the audience a rundown of GloFo's activities both present and future including bits and bobs about its plans for competing in graphics at 28nm and the firm's new process tech.

Microsoft's corporate VP for OEMs, Steve Guggenheimer, showed up to demo Windows 7 "drag and drop" functionality. And HP's sales director also took to the AMD stage to talk about the firm's new dual core DV2 laptops, which we hope will perform better than its current batch of rather sluggish, overheating and noisy portables.

AMD also waxed lyrical about its commitment to ultraportables, which, to be honest, don't seem to pack the same punch Intel's do, but the proof will be in the ultrathin pudding we suppose. Finally, Pat Patla, AMD's VP of server products gushed on for a bit about how Istanbul is great. µ