I have been using AMD processors and ATI video cards for some time, and now ATI is a part of AMD, and AMD has integrated a CPU and GPU into a single “APU” chip.
From what I gather, the performance is along the lines of of a 6500 series video card. All this is well and good, but I was never expecting to match the performance of an i7 with a top of the line Nvidia GPU. Then I saw this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdPi4GPEI74
However, the APU can sync with an ATI 6000 series GPU, making a 1.5x crossfire solution the cost of a normal CPU + 1 GPU purchase. Never mind that for the cost-conscious, a $140 CPU is like buying $300+ of cpu and gpu. This has interested me so much that my next purchase will be a board and AMD APU and a very decent pair of DIMMs (I’m assuming of course the GPU ram is shared with the system ram) to see just how good the built in GPU is.
For someone like me with a Quad-core system without a reasonable need to upgrade I found this offering to be the added boost I needed to start shopping around. It’s a shame I’ll miss out on the Phenom6-cores, but I’ve gone from dual to quad when they came out, so why not try this out instead?
Fingers crossed, 6-core by the time I have everything ready X)
Steven A, on computing and life... 