AMD Makes A Graphic Move

With its first-quarter introduction of the 690 integrated graphics chipset, Advanced Micro Devices trumpeted its entry into the integrated graphics market, and system builders are giving it a welcoming cheer.

"We were impressed, a thumbs-up," said Ned Yousefzadeh, president of Los Angeles-based Micro League, who found the images vivid and the appearance of applications solid on a 690G-based Vista machine.

The integrated chip is the result of AMD's $5.4 billion acquisition last year of ATI Technologies. The move gives it an answer to the 950G chipset from Intel, which held a market-leading 37.4 percent share of the graphics processor market in the fourth quarter, according to Jon Peddie Research. ATI trailed at 23 percent, behind Nvidia at 28.5 percent, and industry watchers are primed to see how AMD's chipsets will alter the picture as the industry moves toward even deeper integration of graphics into the CPU.

System builders, though, may be more interested in what's inside the chipset today. The 690 family has two variants: The mainstream 690G features the ATI Radeon X1250 graphics processor and the value-based 690V, the ATI Radeon X1200 processor.

Both share up to 1 Gbyte of system memory and offer a new video decode block and HDMI output for high-definition video. They also include hardware decoding for MPEG2, the video compression technology used with DVDs, which means PCs will use less CPU power when playing DVDs.

Another feature of particular interest to system builders is ATI's Avivo technology, which supports Microsoft Vista's Aero user interface, and the chipsets support up to 1.07 billion colors, a big step up from the standard 16.7 million colors.

The main difference between the two chipsets is that the higher-end 690G chipset supports integrated DVI output. Yousefzadeh said the 690G chipset is particularly good for HD video and digital multimedia, as well as for a gaming unit. While integrated chips often hiccup on the demands made by 3-D games, that was not the case for the 690G. He also noted there was no lag time in playing HD video, the colors were vibrant and the playback smooth.

Other system builders are looking forward to the reduced costs and fewer integration hassles of an integrated graphics processor.

Next: AMD's integrated graphics outlook