ATI shows off working DX11 chips

Wafers and demos

Jun 3, 2009 by

AMD DROPPED A bombshell on Computex today, showing off not only an Cypress (commonly mis-known as R870) wafer, but also working silicon. As we keep saying, the competition has yet to tape out a chip.

Cypress wafer

Quick, count the dies

The demo itself was a loop of a character from the MS DX11 SDK, publicly shown running on real silicon for the first time. Not much to say, the demo itself wasn’t all that exciting, just a high polygon character made with tessellation.

One interesting bit that AMD disclosed is that Cypress will support virtualization. You will likely need an 890 chipset that has an IOMMU in order to take real advantage of the capabilities. For many companies, this will be a killer app for the ATI chipset and video card combo.

Sadly, the hardware it was running on was behind closed curtains. Given that it is a development board, that is understandable, those things aren’t very sexy. Unless you are a geek, and understand what the silicon is. Then it is very sexy, as long as you can get under the heatsink.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate