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Gaming Hardware and Chipset Update
By Len "Viking1" HjalmarsonArticle Type: Hardware/CPU/MoBo
Article Date: September 20, 2001
David and Goliath, Round Three - Summer, 2001
And a champion went out from the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, from Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.
He had a bronze helmet on his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze.
And he had bronze armor on his legs and a bronze javelin between his shoulders.
The staff of his spear was like a weavers beam, and his iron spear-head weighed six hundred shekels; and a shield-bearer went before him.
Then David took his staff in his hand, and he chose for himself five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag. And he drew near to the Philistine.—1 Samuel 17 & 18
Roughly four years ago, when AMD released their K3, it was evident that the David and Goliath story was being enacted before our eyes. At that time, however, AMD didn’t quite have the stuff to cut off the head of the giant.
Two years ago AMD released their K7, the Athlon. This young upstart soon began to give Intel a very rough ride indeed. And to the delight and benefit of gamers everywhere, the prices of Intel CPU’s began to drop rapidly.
Today we are in the best situation we have ever been in. The cost of a state of the art AMD Athlon, at 1.4 GHz, is around $110 US. The same speed Intel P4 CPU is $169. But as we all know, the 1.4 P4 produces only about 75% of the in-game frame rate of the Athlon CPU. In order to get the same speed, one has to purchase a 1.7 GHz P4 for $300. (All considerations of overclocking aside).
Has AMD cut the head off the giant? Well, perhaps not quite.
Although many of the 1333 MHz AMD Thunderbird CPUs will clock to 1650MHz or higher, AMD seems to currently be stuck at the 1.4 GHz mark. Will the new Palomino core finally move them beyond this point? Most likely. In fact Palomino is expected to appear in September at speeds of 1.5 GHz and higher. But what is this new horse anyway?
Essentially Palomino is the Thunderbird reworked for less power consumption and for multi-processor installations. Rechristened the Athlon4, the first Palomino processors are showing up in laptops and notebooks. Not until the release of their next CPU will AMD move to a thinner die. Thoroughbred, their next CPU, is expected to show up just in time for Christmas, and will likely launch at 1.8 GHz.
Thoroughbred, or Athlon5, will not only arrive on a thinner die, reducing heat and allowing higher clock speeds, but will also sport an enhanced 3dNOW instruction set, christened somewhere as 3dNOW Pro. But the biggest news isn’t only higher clock speeds and new instructions, the biggest news is nForce.
The Force Will be With Them
VIA, Apollo, Intel, AMD, SiS…who really cares?
Anyone who has ever built a custom system or gone out shopping for a new motherboard knows that these little chipsets make all the difference in the world. Simply put, the right chipset will either make or break your PC gaming experience.
And that is why NVIDIA’s announcement of a new high performance chipset for AMD mainboards is one of the hottest gaming announcements of 2001.
So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, and struck the Philistine and killed him.
Then David took his sword and drew it out of its sheath and cut off his head with it.—1 Samuel 18
The job of the chipset on the motherboard is to provide communications links to every other component in the PC. The chipset connects the processor to memory, memory to the graphics board, processor to port, and PCI component to main memory.
The weakness of that analogy is that you might assume that any comms connection will do. The reality is that the chipset is more like a 56K modem made in 1999. There are some good ones, and some bad ones, and though they are all rated at 56K, some perform consistently at that level while others do not. In fact, some are compatible with all the other components in 99% of situations, others are only compatible in 90% of common configurations.
The best chipset provides the fastest and most reliable communication between all system components all the time. A weak chipset actually compromises the entire system, much as a cheap 56K modem gives you hang-ups, disconnects, and low transfer rates.
Now what if someone replaced that 56K model with a really good ADSL system? Suddenly it’s a whole new ball game. Essentially, this is NVIDIA's goal with the nForce chipset, except it has nothing to do with modems. It has everything to do with total system performance, and even beyond.
A Chipset Primer
The chipset on your mainboard is just that: a set of chips. Typically there are two: the “north bridge,” the larger high-speed chip that connects the processor to the main memory and graphics board, and the “south bridge,” that connects to the north bridge either through the PCI-bus or through a dedicated bus. The job of the south bridge is to offer PCI-functionality for PCI bus boards in the system. The south bridge usually provides an integrated IDE hard drive controller, a floppy controller, serial, parallel and USB-ports, the power and system management and occasionally with codecs like the AC97 for basic sound abilities.
The north bridge plays a vital role in system performance. The issues which affect performance for this part are memory bandwidth, overall latency, data bandwidth to the graphics subsystem, and data bandwidth to the south bridge. Nvidia has targeted their nForce chipset to address each of those issues. Furthermore, they have integrated a GeForce2 graphics processor into the chip!
What? Isn’t that changing the rules? Well, yes, and that is the key to innovation and improvement in PC performance.
Now before you tell me that I’m wrong, consider for a moment that the integration of a high performance part like this doesn’t necessarily affect the purchase of the latest and greatest graphics board. The beauty of integration is that it results in a much cheaper part. The cost of the GeForce2 as integrated into nForce might only affect the cost of an nForce mainboard by $20. That’s a beauty of a deal for the guy who only wants a business PC, and the guy who wants the latest hardware can simply disable onboard video.
Because NVIDIA has integrated a graphics chip into the north bridge, they call their north bridge chip the IGP, for Integrated Graphics Processor. Without going into detail, trust me when I tell you that this is the most sophisticated chipset ever produced, and it will open the way for AMD systems to simply FLY. That’s right…AMD only…the nForce chipset is not designed to work with Intel processors.For one example, where chipsets commonly sport a 64-bit wide memory interface, nForce sports two 64-bit memory controllers. Further, the controllers can work independently, and can even work simultaneously with different memory types!“…this is the most sophisticated chipset ever produced, and it will open the way for AMD systems to simply FLY.”
The South Bridge
The biggest issue for the south bridge is compatibility. It’s this chip that has to talk to all those components that you add to your system, including PCI cards, ISA cards, USB-devices, printers, scanners, modems, and more.
Again, NVIDIA bends the rules. nForce's south bridge is titled “MCP” for “Media and Communications Processor,” and offers the some unusual features. A high bandwidth interface connects it to the north bridge. It sports a dual ATA100 IDE controller. It has a full networking feature set, Full networking feature set, including FastEthernet 100/10 Mbit, HomePNA 2.0 and SoftModem. It features six concurrent USB-ports with 2 USB-hubs, and it sports features allowing high bandwidth and guaranteed real time memory access of all devices connected to the MCP.
Furthermore, it happens to contain NVIDIA's new APU (Audio Processing Unit), an audio device with an impressive feature set, including Dolby Digital encoding for AC3-output. The device uses two DSPs, one for voice and a programmable unit for the rest of the sound.
This integrated sound subsystem is identical to what will appear in Xbox. The audio features are state of the art, including the first hardware DirectX8 audio processor, support for 256 unique stereo voices (64 can be 3d), a Dolby Digital 5.1 Encoder, DSL2-acceleration, and a 32 bin mixer (8 voice volumes each provide a total of 256 voices). As with the onboard graphics processor, a user could disable onboard audio. However, with features that are even beyond Creative’s current SB Live, who would want to?
NVIDIA's nForce looks like a force to be reckoned with, and may finally do away with our chipset woes. Equally significant, nForce may allow David to finally bury Goliath.
“But wait!” you say. “What about the Pentium IV, the first to break the 2 GHz barrier?”
Underwhelming. The performance of this chip is about the same at an AMD Athlon at 1.5 GHz. Wake up and smell the coffee.
Of course, Intel has allowed the new iteration of the P4 to support DDRAM, a good move strategically but not a wise move technologically. The P4 needs the extra bandwidth of RDRAM to keep it competitive with the AMD Athlon. That’s right—you have to spend extra cash on memory as well as the CPU to come close to the gaming performance of a 1.4GHz Athlon (which you can readily overclock to about 1650, and some go as high as 1750).
When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled. And the wounded of the Philistines fell along the road to Shaarim, even as far as Gath and Ekron. —1 Samuel 18
Time for Intel to do some serious soul-searching. As for me and my house, we’ll stick with AMD.