AMD 9-Series Chipset
The 9-series gives you AMD 8-core desktop processors and features AM3+ socket compatibility (backward compatible with all AM3 AMD processors). SATA speeds can his 6Gbps allowing for multiple RAID configurations and with the AMD CrossFireX support you can link up to 4 GPUs. There are three varieties of the 9-series: 970, 990X and 990FX
While the 9-series was launched June 1st, motherboards should be showing up later this month and Zambezi (the next CPU line) are scheduled to be available in Q3.
Thanks to AMD ’Bulldozer’ modules, the systems are designed to switch between shared and dedicated components for best per watt performance.
AMD 6000 Series GPUs
The third piece of their end-to-end solution is the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series. That includes the 6770, 6870 and 6970 HD cards.
Now I’m always skeptical when it comes to performance numbers from GPU makers. However, they didn’t compare their cards to others. They compared the performance of DirectX 9 vs. DX 11 on their cards and this is what it looks like.
DirectX 11 is where things are heading and fast. Dragon Age II, Total war Shogun 2, DiRT 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and many others are going DX11 and that means if you want the best performance you will need a DX11 graphics card, no matter who makes it.
Here’s some info on how they tested this.
Test conducted in AMD Labs measuring frames per second performance while playing Total War: Shogun 2 at a resolution of 1280x720 with anti-aliasing turned off and anisotropic filtering turned off. It scored up to 19 fps in DirectX 9 mode and up to 23 fps in DirectX 11 mode or up to 21% faster. Test conducted in AMD Labs measuring frames per second performance while playing Dirt3 at a resolution of 1360x768 with anti-aliasing turned off and anisotropic filtering turned off. It scored up to 34 fps in DirectX 9 mode and up to 48 fps in DirectX 11 mode or up to 40% faster. Configuration for testing a Llano prototype 1.8GHz with AMD Radeon HD 6530, 4GB DDR3 1333Mhz, Windows Home Premium 64-bit. All frame rates rounded to the nearest whole number.
