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Hardware More AMD RS780 Details Revealed
Anh Tuan Huynh (Blog) - July 30, 2007 3:58 PM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 55 comment(s) - last by namechamps.. on Aug 4 at 12:41 AM
AMD's next integrated graphics chipset to feature HyperFlash

AMD’s latest roadmap reveals more details of its upcoming next-generation RS780 chipset. AMD plans to target the chipset towards consumer and commercial desktop platforms, with minor differences for each respective segment. AMD designed the RS780 to accommodate its upcoming Socket AM2+ processors with HyperTransport 3.0.

The RS780 sports a new graphics core with AMD’s Universal Video Decoder, or UVD, technology for hardware acceleration of H.264 and VC-1 video formats. The new chipset supports DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI digital video output interfaces. AMD also integrates an audio controller for simultaneous audio and video output over HDMI. The chipset also integrates HDCP support.

Additionally, the chipset supports TV-out, VGA and LVDS outputs. The graphics core also has two independent display controllers for dual independent displays.  The local frame buffer feature will make a return on the RS780, allowing manufacturers to equip the graphics core with dedicated video memory. Users that prefer more 3D graphics power can install an external graphics card via a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot. The RS780 will also have additional PCIe 2.0 lanes for lesser slots.

New to the RS780 platform is the SB700 south bridge. The SB700 does away with all PCIe lanes and only supports PCI, because all PCIe functionality has moved to the north bridge. AMD increases USB support to 12 USB 2.0 ports plus an additional 2 USB 1.1 ports. The new south bridge supports up to six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports with RAID 0, 1 and 10 support. IDE remains a supported feature of the SB700. However, AMD designates the IDE port for double duty – a physical PATA port or for HyperFlash. HyperFlash is AMD’s name for its Intel Turbo Memory competitor.

RS780 for commercial platform has one minor difference compared to the consumer platform. AMD designates a Broadcom BCM5761 managed NIC controller for the commercial platforms. The managed NIC allows for remote management, similar to Intel’s AMT technology. AMD also recommends a TPM 1.2 module for greater security.

Expect AMD to unveil the RS780 sometime next year.

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IDE hate
By sc3252 on 7/30/2007 4:18:45 PM , Rating: 2
Every new motherboard kills my hopes and dreams, mostly because I still have so many IDEA type devices. Do they really have to put in IDE controllers as optional.

I wish all the new motherboards still had two, hell they could cut out floppy port to make room. Forcing an upgrade is what I see them doing with every new motherboard that comes out. First they cut it from two to one, now its optional for one to be on the board. Do they really expect people to upgrade parts that last so long, such as hard drives and dvd drives?




RE: IDE hate
By DeepThought86 on 7/30/2007 4:42:42 PM , Rating: 1
It could be worse. Intel has removed ALL Ide support in ICH9 and ICH8, with the result that every motherboard manufacturer now has to add an extra controller for such a basic function. Even if you're willing to put up with the F6 nonsense when installing you might well find yourself up a creek if your hd dies and your image backup program doesn't have support for the third-party IDE controller (do a search for Acronis SATA problem)!

This is called "progress" by the wise idiots at Intel and now AMD too, as well as the 16-year olds who think SATA is soooo much faster because it has a theoretical 300Mb/s transfer rate.

The same 188t idiot 16-year olds who don't back up their hard drives, so why would they mind if an "it just works" solution has been replaced with something that either needs drivers (AHCI) or which works in PATA emulation mode with the new features (NCQ, 300MB/s) disabled.

I'm just waiting for a bleeding-edge bozo to tell me that Vista works fine (5% installed base)!


RE: IDE hate
By wordsworm on 7/30/2007 9:19:33 PM , Rating: 1
Vista Premium 64 is the best OS I've ever used. It's a matter of time before most people feel the same. Of course, I haven't tried Apple's latest, but I've hated every computer of theirs I've ever tried.

I haven't experienced very many problems yet.

But speaking of IDE. I lost an IDE drive recently by having a student accidentally drop it. It would have been much better to not lose it. It would have been much safer inside the box. Oh well, there goes the $180 200gb hd that had served me so loyally up to that point..


RE: IDE hate
By Redofrac on 7/30/2007 11:42:08 PM , Rating: 5
What, something that doesn't have a horrible bus structure (Should I really need to make sure I put devices on separate channels just so that they don't slow each other down when both accessed?), easy to route cables, hotplugging, NCQ, and so forth? And further criticism because an older OS doesn't automatically have drivers for a newer standard? Yeesh, I wonder what we should still be using if new hardware standards are a no-go.


RE: IDE hate
By DeepThought86 on 7/31/07, Rating: -1
RE: IDE hate
By Redofrac on 7/31/2007 12:32:24 AM , Rating: 5
quote:
How often do you swap drives round that you'd care about the bus structure? Who cares about the bus structure anyway except bozos who're dazzled by buzzwords?


I'm talking about the bus structure in relation to the fact that most boards have two IDE headers. Many computers, even those prebuilt, would include multiple devices per header. Do read up on the fact that the controller can only talk to one drive at a time. Hence there's noticeable slowdown when using both drives heavily on the same cable, especially if one happens to be a CD drive. (Long seek times)

quote:
How often have you used hotplugging? How many people use it in general? A USB enclosure achieves the same thing as well.


USB, while it certainly works, just means another layer of hardware between your drive and the computer. This certainly doesn't simplify things (you seem to be big on this, if I recall), when the drive could just be attached directly (eSATA)

NHQ, I'll admit, isn't particularly useful for most users, and I was just naming additional features off the top of my head that SATA provided above and beyond.

quote:
"An older OS"??? This is precisely the stupid newer-is-better attitude I'm ranting about! 90%+ of the market runs on XP, O lover of shiny new things who can't think critically!


Enough OS ranting, already. By old, I mean it predates SATA adoption. That's all, I'm not implying anything about OS viability, usefulness, etc, or whatever else you may read into it. All I know is that subsequent OSes (Vista, the world outside MS as well) happens to have better support. Keep your Vista ranting elsewhere, please.

And respectfully, I'll pretend there wasn't a thinly veiled insult at the end of your post.


RE: IDE hate
By Meaker10 on 7/31/2007 6:44:46 AM , Rating: 2
Hehe served in everyway Deepthough86, just how old are you? ^-^


RE: IDE hate
By DeepThought86 on 7/31/2007 11:00:34 AM , Rating: 1
Lolz, 0wnzored, zomg, 16-year olds FTW!

Yeah, be happy throwing your old equipment out everytime something shiny and new comes along. Mommy's paying for it so who cares, right? $100 here, $200 there it's all good.


RE: IDE hate
By omnicronx on 7/31/2007 11:35:29 AM , Rating: 3
You are a moron, he just talked circles around you, and you are calling him a 16 year old. He gave you point and proof for every statement he made, all of which is true and makes sense by the way.

I know high school is out right now, but tell your 'mommy' she needs to keep a better eye on you. DT requires a high school education, come back in a few years when you fit the bill.


RE: IDE hate
By lucyphil on 8/1/2007 12:39:06 PM , Rating: 1
What're you talking about? redofrac doesn't even address the problems with XP which is the majority of running systems, or that many modern Intel systems only have 1 PATA controller, which isn't plug and play. Somebody moving a bunch of old drives is out of luck, spending 100's of dollars because the m/b makers saved a few cents.

Who in their right mind would support such a silly state of affairs, regardless of their age? Just because something new comes along doesn't mean it negates the existence of all older hardware investments and OS software. I think the 16 year old jibe is playing on the lack of maturity of this kind of thinking.


RE: IDE hate
By DeepThought86 on 7/31/2007 10:53:17 AM , Rating: 1
It's not just Vista, plenty of Linux kernels that aren't recent don't support SATA.

But why would you support making IDE something non-native i.e requiring a driver, and reducing the number of ports to one or zero??? If anything should be removed it's the floppy port, and keep the 2 PATA ports. Why should PATA be dropped just because SATA comes along. It cuts the chipset manufacturer's costs but it doesn't benefit consumers at all.

With people as gullible as you, manufacturers can prematurely drop support for things to save 50 cents per m/b, while the user shells out $100 for a new drive.


RE: IDE hate
By omnicronx on 7/31/2007 11:39:53 AM , Rating: 2
You should do your homework, Vista does support many sata controllers natively, I have it installed on 3 machines with only sata, and i did not have to press F6 to install. Linux is in the same boat, certain more popular controllers are supported, and actually have been a lot longer than in windows. I currently run Ubuntu, and it also supported my controller.

by the way, each of my computers has a different sata controller.


RE: IDE hate
By Polynikes on 7/31/2007 2:50:02 PM , Rating: 2
That's encouraging to hear. Maybe someday it will be the same with RAID. For once, it'd be nice to not have to bother with drivers during OS installation.


RE: IDE hate
By carl0ski on 7/31/2007 5:38:57 AM , Rating: 2
I don't understand your postering

Seagate and WD have heavily reduced their production of IDE/PATA devices,
they have even started pushing 2'1/2 inch drives. Which simply do not sport a full 40 IDE cable socket.

SATA Optical Drives are freely accessible and affordable.

ICH8/9 and AMD SB700 are for use with brand spanking new processors why would you use a 5+ year old Hard Drive in such a system.

SATA is backwards compatible with generic IDE drivers hense the SATA IDE mode in most System Bios
This feature allows Acronis to boot
Windows XP to install


RE: IDE hate
By lumbergeek on 7/30/2007 5:44:17 PM , Rating: 2
I have plenty of PATA devices too, and I have put them into USB2 external cases and made them portable. It's not a matter of SATA being faster (drive spins at the same speed, making the bandwidth usable only by cache that's not even that fast), but that the SATA cable is so much thinner, easier to route and DOESN"T BLOCK AIRFLOW to the same extent as even rounded PATA cables.


RE: IDE hate
By smitty3268 on 7/30/2007 7:02:39 PM , Rating: 2
That's really the only good solution now. When I did it I was surprised that the speed really didn't seem to be hurt much at all.


RE: IDE hate
By kmmatney on 7/31/2007 12:51:29 AM , Rating: 2
There will be motherboards available that will support IDE, especially cheap-ass boards from ASRock or ECS, so no need to worry.


wow
By 8steve8 on 7/30/2007 4:11:44 PM , Rating: 1
still no raid5 for ati southbridges?

when did intel get it? ich6r?

and nvidia with their nforce 430 southbridge?




RE: wow
By Darkskypoet on 7/30/2007 5:00:34 PM , Rating: 5
It may be supported, but realize it is surely not hardware raid 5. It may be a nice little feature to have the chipset support a software version of such, but it has a noticeable effect on cpu utilization. Something has to compute all of the required extra information a raid 5 array requires, and that something is not the south bridge. So having a mostly software raid 5 solution, really isn't all that great. Ditto for the nVIDIA solution as well.


RE: wow
By lakrids on 7/30/2007 5:20:35 PM , Rating: 2
This argument was valid back in the single core days. But nowadays when we have people whine "YOU DON'T NEED 2 CORES!!!" or "YOU DON'T NEED 4 CORES!!! YOU ARE NEVER USING THEM ANYWAY", I don't feel that argument is valid anymore.

On one side we have people whining about idle cpu cores, on the other side we have people whine about cpu usage. What's wrong with the world?


RE: wow
By danrien on 7/30/07, Rating: -1
RE: wow
By 8steve8 on 7/30/2007 10:39:22 PM , Rating: 2
right.

regardless of your processing power,, if i can buy a chipset w/ raid 5 or one w/o, even if the raid5 is "software"... ill take the one with raid 5... its the most economical way of having some piece of mind. like right now 500gb drives are approaching $100... so 5 drives is 2TB of data for $500 and when a drive fails... you dont lose your data. thats worth the cpu cycles in my book...

theres no way im spending $200+ for raid5 hardware...

and as the guy above me said, in the multi-core age it seems everyone always has some spare processing power around... so realistically it'll have almost zero effect on real-world or noticable system performance.
for the price of a harrdware raid5 controller i can get a quad core cpu... surely it has some extra processing cycles sitting around.


RE: wow
By tuteja1986 on 7/30/2007 11:06:46 PM , Rating: 2
On board Raid 5 soultion are not reliable anyways :! I won't trust it !!


RE: wow
By emboss on 7/31/2007 12:35:05 AM , Rating: 2
If you want software RAID 5, you don't need your motherboard manufacturer to help you. You can just use Linux's or XP's built-in RAID5 functionality.


RE: wow
By Lord Evermore on 7/31/2007 6:35:49 AM , Rating: 2
XP supports RAID5 only after modifying a few system files, and you can't install the OS to the RAID5 array.


RE: wow
By 8steve8 on 7/31/2007 2:36:16 PM , Rating: 2
exactly. you cant install windows on a raid5 partition unless you have a raid controller.
and even if you could, what if windows becomes corrupted, how would you rebuild or see the status of the array??? much better if you don't rely on the os for that.

so u dont think ich9/8/7/6 raid 5 is reliable? ive been using it for a long time, it's great...
ive seen no reliable information or even indications that its not as reliable as any other raid controller.


RE: wow
By SmokeRngs on 8/1/2007 10:25:14 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
ill take the one with raid 5... its the most economical way of having some piece of mind.


Interesting. Another person whom doesn't know what RAID 5 is for or any RAID for that matter. RAID is not for backup since by definition it cannot be a backup solution. You can spend all day pretending your data is safe, but at the end of the day, it's not. The only thing a RAID 5 array provides is increased throughput and some redundancy in case a single drive in an array dies. At this point you can replace the drive and wait for the array to rebuild itself. You are afforded no protection from power surges or dips or another piece of hardware in the system which may take out your drives.

If you want peace of mind, you better start making daily backups, preferably to a permanent, non-magnetic storage media which is properly stored at an offsite location.

quote:
theres no way im spending $200+ for raid5 hardware...


Enjoy losing your array if you ever have to change motherboards. That can include replacing your current one with the exact same model. I've heard so many sob stories about people losing their arrays because they had to RMA their board.


USB 1.1?
By nitrous9200 on 7/30/07, Rating: 0
RE: USB 1.1?
By Hawkido on 7/30/2007 5:12:38 PM , Rating: 2
I have found some devices that WILL NOT work with USB 2.0. Plus not all operating systems support USB 2.0 yet.


RE: USB 1.1?
By MonkeyPaw on 7/30/2007 5:52:49 PM , Rating: 2
12 USB ports aren't enough that you're concerned about ports 13 and 14? If nothing else, plug your USB mouse and keyboard into them.


RE: USB 1.1?
By Samus on 7/30/2007 6:48:36 PM , Rating: 2
most usb-based software 'keys' or 'dongles' don't work in USB 2.0 ports since they address memory differenty at the IO level. That's why you always see a USB 1.1 controller in desktops, often allowing you to allocate one or a pair (laptop or desktop-dependant) of ports to 1.1 'compatibility' mode.


RE: USB 1.1?
By mlau on 7/31/2007 2:58:12 AM , Rating: 2
That's BS. With "compatibility" mode enabled, the BIOS emulates a traditional 8042 keyboard controller for USB BOOT-HID devices, nothing more.

If you attach a USB1.1 device to a 2.0 port, then the EHCI
controller simply hands off the device to a companion OHCI/UHCI controller. There are some newer EHCI which have
built-in transaction translators to eliminate the companion;
if the OS/BIOS can't handle those then get a better OS.


RE: USB 1.1?
By smitty3268 on 7/30/2007 6:58:44 PM , Rating: 1
Keyboard + mouse. Why spend extra money on making them 2.0 if they'll never use it anyway?


RE: USB 1.1?
By Lord Evermore on 7/31/2007 6:38:19 AM , Rating: 2
I doubt it would have been significantly extra money to make them 2.0. Why even bother with 2 extra ports past 12?


RE: USB 1.1?
By Myrandex on 7/31/2007 9:49:35 AM , Rating: 2
Yea I thought that was pretty lame, as I have yet to find a problem with USB 1.1 devices being plugged into USB 2.0 ports.


IDE Hate...
By DeepBlue1975 on 7/31/2007 9:13:56 AM , Rating: 2
For all out there complaining about the increasing lack of IDE support in new motherboards...
How many years have we been using those ugly, fat, inflexible, air circulation obstructing wires?
I'm 32yo and had my first IDE hard drive back in 1991. That was almost 17 years back!!!
Would you also like to keep ISA bus connectors?
If you need to use an IDE drive (I do have one), and your motherboard doesn't support it, you can always get a spare controller... and use it as a second drive.
You can't expect standards to last and be de facto supported forever in the hardware industry, when some new standard is widely accepted as an able and capable replacement for the old one.
Nowadays HDDs are dirt cheap, at less than $100 for 200gb+ drives, if you can't justify to expend that money on a new drive, then you also aren't going to justify to expend what a motherboard's worth by these days (yeah, hard drive prices fall, but motherboards seem to be getting more expensive everyday...)




RE: IDE Hate...
By lucyphil on 8/1/2007 12:41:19 PM , Rating: 2
Dude, spending $100 on a hard drive because the motherboard maker wanted to save $1 on an extra port IS VERY STUPID


RE: IDE Hate...
By namechamps on 8/4/2007 12:41:43 AM , Rating: 2
SATA came out 4 years ago. SATA marketshare is now greater than IDE. You can use a SATA/IDE converter to connect your legacy drive to the SATA port. You could also buy a $10 IDE controller card ($19 for silicon image or promise brand).

The world is not ending.
All tech is replaced eventually.

Just so you are not outraged let me give you a preview so you can start planning now.

Likely in 2016 your MB will only have:
USB & Firewire (no PS2, serial, or parallel ports).
PCIe 2.0 (no ISA, VESA local bus, AGP, or PCI)
DDR3 or 4 or maybe even 5 (DDR or SDRAM will no longer be supported).


By subhajit on 7/30/2007 11:31:33 PM , Rating: 2
I hope this chipset gets released with better driver support than 690G. Before Catalyst 7.6 that chipset was absolutely unusable.




By ultimaone on 7/31/2007 10:41:47 AM , Rating: 1
uh...

we're talking about motherboard chips here

not video cards...


By subhajit on 7/31/2007 1:59:23 PM , Rating: 2
I am talking about motherboard chips also. 690G is the latest chipset with integrated graphics from AMD for AM2 platform.


Hey What Happened
By Aladdin78 on 8/3/2007 6:19:36 AM , Rating: 2
Halfway through reading all the comments I forgot what I was reading about....somewhere along the line people forgot what the article was about and started to diverge in all manner of subjects...IDE this Pata that Raid this etc...

After I scrolled back up to the top of the article I realised that this article was about AMD's RS780 with Hyper flash...Shall we get back on topic ?




RE: Hey What Happened
By Aladdin78 on 8/3/2007 6:27:38 AM , Rating: 2
Sorry wrong post


Raid.
By Mitch101 on 7/30/2007 4:27:46 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
RAID 0, 1 and 10 support


I would like to have seen Raid 5 and 6 as an option because Raid 10 looses too much disk space.

In all I will probably raid-0 and do daily backups of important data to another drive anyway. I can always reload my software and games.




RE: Raid.
By DeepThought86 on 7/30/07, Rating: -1
RE: Raid.
By Mitch101 on 7/30/2007 5:08:55 PM , Rating: 2
Yea Im not ready to abandon EIDE.

Im not thoroughly impressed with SATA/SATA2 as I have had a few msft$ errors with them while my EIDE drives dont seem to have those issues. Not sure what causes it but I get one every couple of months and only on my SATA drives and thats a disaster for RAID. I do the usual reboot and disk diagnostics to find nothing. This is on 3 different machines from ASUS, HP, and The third might be an EPOX. And with 3 different SATA drives from seagate, maxtor, and western digital. Wouldnt be fun to rebuild an array every 3-4 months I see one of those errors.

As for air cooling being superior on SATA well the air in my case moves across the drives one side to other side it doesnt try moving the air from the front of the drive to where the cable resides which is bad design or the typical cheap case.

I like Vista but I dont like its performance or its compatibility with a few of my critical apps.


By Nehemoth on 7/30/2007 6:59:53 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
AMD also integrates an audio controller for simultaneous audio and video output over HDMI.


What about this feature but for DisplayPort??.

Thank you




By civilgeek on 7/31/2007 2:02:26 AM , Rating: 2
I find it very hard to believe the following of of EIDE. Yes for a single drive it is not much different but the overall picture is much better in almost every other situation. SATA bus allows multiple drives to have the headroom to feed data at speeds EIDE could only dream of without making the entire pci buss slow to a crawl. I have 3 servers running multiple raid 5 arrays and one running 12 drives in raid 50. Out of the 22 drives I've had one drive go bad in 3 years of which the machine swapped on its own using a hot swap spare while people worked away. I replaced the spare with the machine on and nobody knew even knew there was a problem. I have also had no data errors.

Defending a very old architecture and saying it is better because you still have an EIDE drive is not an valid argument when in 95% of the other applications SATA is better. If I were a manufacturer and had to break away support from one of the two standards which one do you think it would be? Not to hard to decide. It is like all of the past standards in the computing world... they come and go. EIDE has seen its day and it is now time for it to leave into the abyss as so many others before it. Is it so hard to upgrade when a 200 gig SATA hard drive with a 5 year warranty can be bought for $70 and almost every new motherboard already has the sata port to plug it into? :-)




PCIe 2.0 x16 slot
By luhar49 on 8/1/2007 6:27:24 AM , Rating: 2
That looks like a very nice spec.

Crossfire with ATI cards should see a nice improvement here.
No more of the P965/35 chipset limiting bandwidth to PCIE 1.0 16x + 4x




lemmings dont use custom cards
By GlassHouse69 on 7/31/07, Rating: 0
All talk
By swatX on 7/30/07, Rating: -1
RE: All talk
By OPR8R on 7/30/2007 9:17:31 PM , Rating: 2
I went from 2 x 7900GT SLI to one 2900xt. Although I have seen a big increase in performance, I haven't been bothered by any increase in heat, noise, or power consumption. To top it all off, the card came with Steam Black Box (3 future games) and STALKER, all for about $20 more than the 8800GTS. Anyway, if I remember correctly the 9800 series was in competition w/NV's 5900 series- those cards weren't good.


RE: All talk
By wingless on 7/30/2007 10:08:22 PM , Rating: 2
Do you really mean to say that your single HD 2900XT is faster than two 7900GT's in SLI? I hope you are telling the truth because I just ordered a 2900XT. I have a volt modded MSI 7900GT that runs at 600/850 stable.

Also about this chipset news, I hope AMD will hatch plans to allow the discrete GPU to work with the chipset GPU like Nvidia is planning. Maybe the UVD on the chipset can decode movies while the 2900XT deals with the games. All thats necessary is a little driver magic from AMD's overburdened driver team LOL.


RE: All talk
By OPR8R on 7/30/2007 10:41:26 PM , Rating: 2
I use a 23" 1920x1200 monitor. I was running into frame rate issues w/some of the newer games. It's not an issue now, but that's not to say your experience will be the same. I don't think you'll be disappointed though. Good luck...


RE: All talk
By JonnyDough on 7/31/2007 4:08:47 PM , Rating: 1
It's no secret that the new families from both ATI and NVidia top the last by a good margin. Don't you read hardware reviews before you buy? Not every application will be outdone by a new generation single card over last generation's SLI, but most will. Check out Tom's Hardware 2007 VGA performance chart.


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