ATI RADEON HD 2900 & HD 2600 Series Video cards.

[Hulk]

Let us know what they tell you. I suspect the features are on the silicon but it's broken at this point for some reason and they were already so late with the part they just decided it was best to start shipping and fix it in a later chip revision.

I doubt they would admit that though.

[ND66]

I'm thinking more and more to push my upgrade to the end of this year...... .


.

[schmosef]

bleh!

The Tech Tour was a bust.

No new info was available.

They hyped the HD DVD decoding capabilities of their new cards without mentioning the issues on the 2900XT. The guys doing the presentations all seemed like sales weasles so I didn't bother talking to them about this.

The presentation for the 2900XT included benchmarks that compared it against the nVidia 8800 GTS--not the GTX! And they had the chutzpah to say their card was the fastest on the market.

Also, they hyped AMD CPUs as being viable for enthusiast level PCs. The benchmarks they showed compared their CPUs to Intel's, but the best Intel CPU they showed was an E6600.

They also talked about how AMD was working to help partners develop a new gen of motherboards using their new chipset (the 690) but all the motherboards they demonstrated were "value market" class.

Lastly, they spent a lot of time hyping Barcelona (their quad core tech) and how it was far superior to Intel's (several generations ahead). Meanwhile, Intel has quad core CPUs available on the market right now and AMD's are just vapour as far as we know. No date was mentioned for Barcelona availability, just "sometime in 2007". By the time AMD releases their quad core CPUs, Intel may well have bridged the generational gap that AMD is touting.

[schmosef]

One the plus side they raffled off and gave away a lot of free stuff.

I got a bunch of free pens and t-shirts, which everyone got. I didn't win any off the raffle prizes but one of my employees won a copy of Office 2007 Ultimate.

[ND66]

No hospitality suit? No free beer?




Thanks for the update. Seems like they're falling behind again, the only difference, now they'll drag ATI with them..... .


.

[schmosef]

No hospitality suit? No free beer? .

Actually, they did provide dinner.

The food was ok, not great. It wasn't the best free meal I've had paid for by the industry, but it wasn't the worst either. I'd give it a 6.5 out of 10.

[schmosef]

Thanks for the update. Seems like they're falling behind again, the only difference, now they'll drag ATI with them.....

Agreed. And It's quite unfortunate too.

[ND66]

You know, ATI & AMD merger, and few others…….. it’s kind like in my workplace.

Got acquired by a bigger company, sold to bunch of profit hungry investors that sucked most of the blood from the system, crashed, went thru Chapter 11, sold out again, reorganized, downsized, and now the funny part.

Whatever they do, everything must look good on the paper. No common sense necessary.

Somehow the investors have to see they made the right choice (for yesterday only but anyway, they need to be reassured ), even if more money could be made. It’s like OK, make more money but you’ll not get any more funding for research, design and manufacture of new products.

They’d rather see our company to get “Lean & Mean”, accept, down the road it looks more like anorexia, we keep letting people go to a point the efficiency is not possible anymore…. .

We can’t keep up with the stuff we have, how do you expect new product getting developed?


.